Sirin Kale

Sirin Kale reports long-form investigations and features that cut beneath the surface of entertainment and social stories to expose power, harm and accountability. She writes for the Guardian, focusing on deeply reported pieces that build narrative around individuals and the systems they are trapped in. Her work on culture, television and celebrity often starts from a single incident or controversy and then tracks how institutions enable abuse, exploitation or negligence. She moves between the entertainment industry and wider social subjects with the same method: meticulous reporting, human-centred storytelling and clear, accessible prose.

Sexual misconduct and abuse in film and television

Kale is a central reporter on allegations of misconduct and abuse within the UK screen industry. She co-authored a major investigation into sexual misconduct allegations from 20 women against actor and director Noel Clarke, an exposé credited with helping to trigger a Me Too reckoning in British film and television.

Her reporting on that story combines detailed sourcing, survivor testimony and industry context, mapping how professional structures protected a powerful figure while complaints accumulated.

She has extended this focus to talent shows and reality formats, working on an investigation that revealed how Britain’s Got Talent host David Walliams made derogatory and sexually explicit remarks about contestants, while a database logged which performers were likely to be “buzzed off” during filming. In coverage of the BBC’s decision to pull an Ashley Cain documentary after abusive and misogynistic remarks came to light, she treats entertainment not as soft news but as a site where editorial judgment, audience trust and the welfare of vulnerable participants intersect.

Across these pieces she pays equal attention to individual experiences and the production cultures, legal frameworks and corporate decisions that sit behind on-screen entertainment.

Lost to the Virus and structural failure

Kale authors a signature long-form series for the Guardian on Covid-19 deaths, Lost to the Virus, built around profiles of individuals who died in the pandemic and the structural factors that contributed to their deaths.

Each instalment is a stand-alone narrative about one person, but the series collectively interrogates how policy, bureaucracy and workplace practices translated into avoidable loss. In pieces such as the account of bus driver Mervyn Kennedy, she traces how frontline workers were “forced to play Russian roulette,” documenting the gap between official assurances and the reality of unsafe conditions. In another profile she examines whether a standard NHS 111 triage question contributed to Olufemi Akinnola’s death, showing how small design choices in public health systems carry life-or-death consequences.

This approach runs through her wider health and science features for the Guardian, including long reads on dyslexia and on the man who fell from a passenger plane into a London garden. She uses individual stories to illuminate contested expertise, institutional opacity and the emotional weight of policy decisions, making complex subjects legible without diluting their nuance. The same investigative and narrative discipline that marks her entertainment work is present here, but applied to medicine, social care and migration instead of film or television.

Scams, exploitation and everyday harm

Beyond Covid-19 and screen culture, Kale repeatedly returns to stories where ordinary people are exposed to hidden forms of exploitation. Her reporting on influencers promoting “wild” births through the Free Birth Society shows how wellness branding and online community-building can mask serious risk, linking ideology and marketing to deaths across different countries.

She has investigated a lettings agency that turned tenants’ homes into cannabis farms, charting how lax oversight and opaque business models left families facing ruined properties and legal jeopardy.

Earlier long reads on dropshipping and on aeroplane stowaways examine globalised commerce and migration through the lens of individuals caught at the edges of these systems. In each case she traces the routes by which harm travels - from influencer courses to social media feeds, from logistics platforms to small sellers, from airline procedures to the body of a man falling from the sky - and shows how those routes are structured and maintained. Her emphasis is not on spectacle but on cause and effect: who profits, who decides, and who bears the consequences.

Audio investigations, reality TV and online stalking

Kale extends her reporting into audio, hosting the Guardian podcast Can I Tell You A Secret? about serial cyberstalker Matthew Hardy, and co-hosting Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV for the BBC. The stalking series weaves victim accounts, legal records and expert analysis into a narrative about how social platforms and police responses failed to protect targets over many years. Unreal dissects reality television as a system, drawing on her entertainment reporting to examine how formats, editing and casting decisions shape participants’ lives and public discourse.

She is also among the journalists whose work is adapted for the Guardian’s audio long read strand, and she has written pieces that translate quiz shows and other entertainment formats into reported features rather than fan coverage. Across print and audio, Kale’s distinguishing trait is the same: she treats entertainment, internet culture and everyday life as beats where serious power imbalances play out, and she uses long-form storytelling and investigation to make those dynamics visible.