Obituary: Andrew Norfolk, who recorded the journalist, who discovered the abuse scandal of Rotherham

Andrew Norfolk was probably the most important investigative reporter in his generation. However, he was not what they could expect from a journalist.

He was low and quite shy. Its great qualities were empathy and humility. He felt for the people he wrote about; Sometimes when he told you her stories and the horrors he had heard, he shook.

He taught us all patience. He spent a case in court week after week with a case that was then given up. None of this could be reported, months were lost. He continued.

He looked at hideous abuse and violent threats. The obstruction and the stone change of the police and the government were exhausting. Listening to so many reports on manipulation, rape and assault was exhausting. With all of this he was selfless and gently spoken – except on the side, where he made it impossible to neglect voices that had become unusual for years.

In 2010 I edited the Just When the British news editor mentioned a story that Andrew wanted to examine. He said that in cities in northern England gangs from men, young girls cared for teenagers, persecuted them with a drink and drugs, then laid them over shops in abandoned apartments and rooms. I remember that I thought it couldn't be true, it sounded like a story of the Victorian period.

We didn't hear anything for a few months. Then Andrew came back: he had combined the evidence that he had combed documents, analyzed the patterns of legal proceedings and convictions and spoke to the girls, young women and families who had previously been dismissed by the police, neglected by social workers and ignored by Council officials.

In January 2011, Andrew's first report on the cover -up was published: “Conspiracy of silence about British sexuals”. The men were mainly from the Pakistani heritage; The girls were mostly white, between 11 and 15 years. Andrew had been warned of history, said that it would be dangerous for municipal relationships, and a blessing for the British national party, who tried to defuse the hatred of Muslims. (For exactly these reasons, Ann Cryer, the Labor MP, was avoided by her party and her government officials when she was a lonely voice, who tried to raise the topic seven years earlier.)

He was undeterred and would neither accuse him of racism, nor by the fascist applause, nor the government's disabilities.

He spent more and more time to meet families and to take part in court hearings in Rochdale, Telford, Blackpool, Bristol, Oxford and of course Rotherham. In autumn 2011, when we met in Starbucks in Manchester, he feared that the paper or readers could tire of history. He just started.

Once he took me for a day to meet people in Rochdale and Rotherham. We sat up in the house of a family, and a young woman described everything with details – the bag with chips, the brand of the car, the bottle of vodka, the mattress on the floor – that are difficult to forget. In the car on the way back it felt like we had owed her a guilt. We didn't say much, apart from the promise that Andrew would not stop until her story had been told.

Keir Starrer, then the head of the Crown Prosecutor, and Nazir Afzal, who led the CPS in the northwest of England, increased the persecution of the nursing rinds in the light of Andrew's reporting and finally secured convicts of the gangs after walking in cities across the country.

Andrew followed every possibility in history. The girls were generally arm, many lived in nursing homes. He examined who headed her, the private equity companies that she belonged to and the economic machine of abuse. He was sitting in so many legal proceedings that the girls had already been treated with contempt or suspicion were forced to take the status and to consider for hours, sometimes, in basic, traumatic details. He also reported that the abuse of institutional power also forced a change in court practice.

Rotherham had done everything to get away in Andrews. The Council was looking for an injunction to prevent them Just From the publication, Andrew's reporting would endanger the girls and young women. They asked the then Foreign Minister Michael Gove to support them in court. From his special advisor, Dominic Cummings, the news came back that Gove would like to provide evidence in this case, but in the name of the Just. Rotherham folded, Andrew's reporting was published and finally the council chairman resigned.

When Alexis Jay delivered the results of her investigation into the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham, she found that 1,400 girls had been abused between 1997 and 2013. In the past 30 years it has been difficult to think about reporting in this country that has been exposed to so much crime and such a sustainable cover -up.

Andrew Leise stepped back from the back last November Just. When I dropped a line to say that it had been such a point of pride to work with him, he wrote back in his ironic way to say that my body decided to take his revenge after a life with “completely intact health”. He had been in and outside the hospital. He collapsed last week and died on a medical appointment. He was 60.

He was always interested in passing on the loan for his work to others, the editors on the desk who commissioned reporting, the columnists who had campaigned for the problem. Although it is true that nobody can achieve anything in journalism alone, he reported very uniquely about the care bands. He showed the rest of us what it really needs to be a basic, determined and human reporter what it is patient and compassionate. It may not be what many people think, how journalists are, but what Andrew has shown, we can be.

After broken the story for the first time in January 2011, he always worked tirelessly and full -time. When he returned it to me: “It took another three years, but we ended up there.”

Andrew Norfolk, an investigative journalist, was born on January 8, 1965 and died after the collapse of a routine medical examination on May 8, 2025 at the age of 60