Linda Deutsch

Early life and education

Deutsch was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and grew up in Bradley Beach on the Jersey Shore. At age 12, she started a newsletter for an Elvis Presley fan club, sparking her interest in journalism. She graduated from Asbury Park High School and earned a bachelor's degree in English from Monmouth University in 1965. Her uncle, a newspaper editor, encouraged her to pursue journalism despite the field's lack of gender diversity at the time.

Career

While in college, Deutsch interned at the Perth Amboy Evening News and at age 20 covered the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, where she heard Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech; her report earned her first front-page byline. After graduating, she moved to Southern California and briefly worked for The San Bernardino Sun. She joined the Associated Press in January 1967 as the only woman in the Los Angeles bureau. She later said she was never harassed, attributing this to her competence, though she noted discrimination in pay and assignments.

She rose to become a special correspondent in 1992, a title given to only 18 reporters since the AP's founding. Deutsch covered the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the trials of Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, Angela Davis, Daniel Ellsberg, Patty Hearst, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, O. J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Richard Ramirez, and Lyle and Erik Menendez. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her pool reporting at Simpson's trial, which also marked her first television journalism work.

In 1975, she interviewed evacuees from Vietnam on Guam after the Fall of Saigon. She reported on the Rodney King riots in 1992 and promoted Theo Wilson's memoir at her own expense in 1997. She retired in 2014 but returned in 2019 to interview Simpson about his life after imprisonment for armed robbery. That year, she endowed $1 million in journalism scholarships at Monmouth University.