Michele R. McPhee (born April 8, 1970)[4] is an American author, talk radio host, and five-time Emmy nominated investigative journalist from Boston.
She now lives in Los Angeles writing screenplays, most recently for Showtime's City on a Hill, and has a HBO series in development based on her Newsweek cover story.
[11] In December 1996, McPhee joined the New York Daily News, writing her first article for the newspaper for the Christmas Eve edition, "No Bail For Alleged Gotti Heir".
[4] In response to a story she wrote about police suspicions of a local judge, McPhee received death threats through an anonymously written letter in January 2003.
In 2003, McPhee participated in a debate about the police shooting of Amadou Diallo alongside attorney Anthony H. Gair on the NPR program The Tavis Smiley Show, guest hosted that day by Tony Cox.
In June 2015, McPhee pleaded not guilty to charges of operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol, resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer.
She, together with the hosts of the show, used football metaphors[23] to suggest he was sexually attracted to men, and "jokingly riffed" on this theme in a manner reported by the New Yorker as "cringe-inducing".
[24] McPhee has argued that this was not an "outing", and that focus on Hernandez's sexuality in her investigations, and her later reporting after his death, was to explore motives for the murder of Odin Lloyd.
[24] Two days after Hernandez's death, McPhee wrote a piece in Newsweek[25] which covered, along with other aspects of his history, an “intimate relationship” he reportedly had with a male friend from high school.