Kim Bellware is a national reporter for The Washington Post, covering breaking news with a focus on how the criminal legal system shapes people’s lives. Based in Chicago, her reporting has examined evolving attitudes toward the death penalty, the criminalization of women’s reproductive outcomes in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, and how courts are re-evaluating the role of domestic violence and trafficking in cases involving female defendants.

She was a 2023 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia University where she studied trauma-informed reporting practices and strategies for building more resilient newsrooms.

Her reporting has taken her from federal court in the Southern District of New York—where she covered E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse case against Donald Trump—to death row in Oklahoma, to hurricane recovery efforts in eastern Tennessee.