In one of the most revealing stories of the year, investigative reporters Juliet Linderman and Claire Galofaro spent three years fighting to unseal court records in a secretive Virginia adoption case involving a U.S. Marine and an Afghan war orphan — and uncovered how the U.S. government enabled an adoption process riddled with legal and ethical failures.
In 2022, the reporters were barred from a courtroom in rural Fluvanna County, Virginia, where they had returned to follow up on a story they had broken about a Marine adopting an Afghan child despite the objections of an Afghan couple who claimed to be the girl’s family. The case was so secret that the court clerk refused to acknowledge it even existed.
Determined to get answers, Linderman and Galofaro pressed for transparency — writing to the judge, working with a local attorney and continuously pushing for access to sealed files. In late 2025, their persistence paid off. They obtained 16,000 pages of documents that told a stunning story: how the U.S. government — across agencies and jurisdictions — repeatedly worked at cross-purposes, ultimately enabling an adoption that appeared to violate state law, federal regulations and international treaties.
The records exposed systemic failure, legal overreach, and miscommunication at nearly every level — and even included a rare admission from the judge who finalized the adoption, calling the case deeply flawed.
Marshall Ritzel produced compelling visuals from the documents, and Allen Breed crafted a clean, powerful layout for the APNews presentation.
For years of persistence, exclusive access to sealed records, and reporting that exposed institutional failure in a case with global stakes, Juliet Linderman and Claire Galofaro win this week’s Best of AP — First Winner.
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