Gerald Posner

Gerald Posner
Posner in 2013 in Miami
Born	Gerald Leo Posner (1954-05-20) May 20, 1954 (age 62) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer
Spouse(s)	Trisha Posner

Gerald Leo Posner (born May 20, 1954) is an American investigative journalist and author of twelve books, including Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), which explores the John F. Kennedy assassination, and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. A plagiarism scandal involving his articles and books arose in 2010. In 2015, the Chicago Tribune called Posner "a merciless pitbull of an investigator."

Posner was born in San Francisco, the only child of Jerry and Gloria Posner. His father was Jewish and his mother Catholic, and both were native San Franciscans. His father was a labor union official.

Posner was raised Catholic. He was educated at St. Ignatius College Preparatory and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. In 1978, he earned his J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where he served as the associate executive editor for the university's Law Review.

At age 23, he joined law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore as one of the youngest attorneys ever hired by the firm. In 1980, he went into private practice with a partner. He left the law in 1986, when his first book, about Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele's life on the run, was published by McGraw Hill.

Posner's first book, co-written with British journalist John Ware, was the 1986 biography Mengele: The Complete Story. The book was the result of a five-year pro bono lawsuit that Posner brought on behalf of survivors of Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. Posner and Ware obtained exclusive access to 5,000 pages of Mengele's diaries and personal papers for their book. The book was critically recognized as the "definitive" biography of Mengele.