Gavin Hall MacFadyen was an American investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker.
23 Facts About Gavin MacFadyen
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Gavin MacFadyen was the director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London; Co-Founder with Eileen Chubb of the UK whistleblower support group, The Whistler; and a Trustee of the Courage Foundation.
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Gavin MacFadyen acted as an advocate for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, eventually becoming a director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
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The Gavin MacFadyen Award has been presented annually since 2017, for which nominations are accepted from and voted on by whistleblowers only.
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Gavin MacFadyen adopted the surname of his stepfather, a medical researcher.
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Gavin MacFadyen studied at Shimer College from 1958 to 1959, and later worked as a union organizer with trade unions.
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Gavin MacFadyen was jailed for participating in civil rights demonstrations.
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Gavin MacFadyen moved to England, joined the International Socialists, and graduated from the London School of Film Technique.
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Gavin MacFadyen founded a documentary film group to chronicle the political turmoil in the United States during the late 1960s for the BBC.
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Gavin MacFadyen covered the anti-Vietnam War protests, race riots and the police clash with demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, where tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters battled police in the streets, while the Democratic Party fell apart over an internal disagreement concerning its stance on Vietnam.
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Gavin MacFadyen went on to report from the Nicaraguan Revolution, a war between the right-wing Contras and the Marxist Sandinista National Liberation Front in the 1980s, and Iran-Contra, neo-Nazi violence, Watergate, the history of CIA.
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Gavin MacFadyen had produced and directed more than 50 documentaries since the 1970s many for Granada Television's World In Action, investigating a diverse range of topics that includes industrial accidents, neo-Nazi violence in the UK, Chinese criminal societies, the history of the CIA, Watergate, election fraud in Guyana, the Iraq arms trade, child labour, nuclear proliferation, and Frank Sinatra's connection to organised crime.
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Gavin MacFadyen's programmes have been featured on Channel 4, the BBC, Panorama, Granada Television, ABC, and PBS Frontline.
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Gavin MacFadyen directed the organisation's International Journalism Summer Schools in 2003,2004, and 2006.
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Gavin MacFadyen was a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and acted as a visiting professor at City University from 2003 to 2014 when it acted as CIJ's base.
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Gavin MacFadyen and Eileen Chubb co-founded The Whistler, which was intended to provide a legal, psychological and social support network for whistleblowers from any organization, public or private, in the UK and he was a supporter of Edna's Law.
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Gavin MacFadyen became an early mentor and defender of WikiLeaks and friend of Julian Assange, an Australian computer programmer, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and published millions of secret documents, many supplied by Chelsea Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst.
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Gavin MacFadyen helped form the Julian Assange Defense Committee along with his wife Susan Benn and the journalist John Pilger.
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Gavin MacFadyen directed the New York conference on Financial and Business Investigative Journalism in 2005 at Columbia University.
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Gavin MacFadyen received a European Union MEDIA Programme grant in 1998 for work on a Social History website project, and was a senior research fellow at Caledonian University in 2000 and at Glasgow University from 2002 to 2003.
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Gavin MacFadyen lived in the Pimlico district of London with his wife, Susan Benn.
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Gavin MacFadyen died of lung cancer in London on October 22,2016, at the age of 76.
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When Gavin MacFadyen died, Assange asked to be allowed to temporarily leave his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy to attend the funeral, but the request was denied by Sweden's Attorney General Anders Perklev.