Steve Fainaru (Romanian: Făinaru; born 1962) is an American investigative journalist and senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

He was previously a correspondent for the Washington Post, where his coverage of the Iraq War earned him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2008.

He co-wrote League of Denial with his brother Mark Fainaru-Wada, a book about traumatic brain injury in the National Football League, which earned Fainaru and his brother the 2014 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.

He returned to the Bay Area and worked for the San Jose Mercury News, then moved to the East coast, working for the Hartford Courant (Connecticut) from 1986 to 1989, then The Boston Globe, where he was named the Globe New York bureau chief.

From 1995 to 1998 he was the Globe Latin American bureau chief, based in Mexico City.