Sue Reid: Age, Career and the Daily Mail Investigations Editor Who Went Back to Rotherham
Some reporters file a story and move on. A few go back years later to see whether anything changed.
Sue Reid interviewed a teenage girl in Rotherham about the gangs operating in the town. Years afterwards she returned and found the same person, by then in her twenties, and asked to be shown what was still happening. The woman walked her into the town centre at night and pointed out men gathered around girls near a bus stop.
Reid is Special Investigations Editor of the Daily Mail, one of the most senior investigative posts in British newspapers. She has no Wikipedia page. Around 790 people a month search her name, and what they find instead is a Canadian Olympic hockey player.
Sue Reid: quick facts
| Full name | Sue Reid |
| Occupation | Special Investigations Editor, Daily Mail |
| Nationality | British |
| Based in | London |
| Best known for | Reporting on grooming gangs in Rotherham, migration and asylum investigations |
| Recent beats | Asylum accommodation, small boats, deportation policy, European border politics |
| Broadcast | GB News, including Talking Pints with Nigel Farage in 2022 |
| Age / date of birth | Not published |
| Husband, partner, children | Not publicly documented |
| Wikipedia page | None. The entry under that name belongs to a Canadian field hockey Olympian |
What she investigates now
Migration and asylum, mostly from inside the buildings and towns involved.
Her recent Daily Mail work includes a tour of the Copthorne Hotel, whose brasserie was once a local family restaurant and is now asylum accommodation. She has reported on a protest of around 250 people – pensioners and students among them – carrying placards reading that Jesus was a refugee. She has written on what failed asylum seekers could buy abroad with a £40,000 voluntary return payment, and asked how many members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard might arrive on small boats.
She also works outside Britain. One recent piece examined Hungary’s 110-mile barbed wire border fence ahead of an election, framed around whether the politician who built it was about to lose power.
A separate investigation reported that around 200 million animals a year in the UK are killed by having their throats cut while conscious, under halal and kosher slaughter exemptions.
That range – hotels, borders, abattoirs – is what a special investigations desk looks like when one person runs it.
Rotherham, and the reporting she is known for
She has said she reported on grooming gangs around fifteen years ago, and that she broke the story in Rotherham.
The chronology matters here and is genuinely contested. Andrew Norfolk of The Times, who died in May 2025 aged 60, is the journalist most widely credited with exposing the scandal, through reporting from 2011 that revealed a pattern of mainly white teenage girls being abused by groups of men of Pakistani heritage. That work led to the inquiry which produced the 2014 Jay Report, finding that at least 1,400 children in Rotherham were exploited between 1997 and 2013.
Reid’s account is that she was reporting on the same subject before that, and returned to it repeatedly afterwards. Both things can be true, and the public record does not settle who published what first.
What she says the reporting cost her
Two claims recur in her own account, and both are worth stating plainly as her testimony rather than as established fact.
The first is that she was called a liar and a racist for the work. The second is that when she took information to authorities, she was blanked – told, in her telling, that they did not discriminate by race or by physical descriptions of the men involved.
She has also described a four-hour interview with a victim in which the ethnicity of the perpetrators only came up at the very end, when the family called her back to say she had never asked. Her explanation is that she deliberately had not.
The disagreement about whether it is still happening
In June 2025, after the Prime Minister announced a national inquiry, Reid told GB News’ Good Afternoon Britain that the gangs are still operating and that she had been told so within the previous fortnight.
That claim is disputed by at least one formal review. In 2022, after Conservative councillors alleged that exploitation in Rotherham was continuing on the scale of the past, an independent review commissioned by the council and South Yorkshire Police found the specific allegations were not founded and described the authorities’ response as effective.
Reid is a reporter making a claim based on her sources. The review examined different, earlier allegations. Readers can hold both facts at once, and this page is not the place to settle it.
Television
She appears on GB News with some regularity, and in February 2022 sat down with Nigel Farage for Talking Pints, recorded in Blackpool, to talk about her career rather than a single story. Her line in that conversation was that she knows the work is dangerous.
The other Sue Reid
Search the name on Wikipedia and you get an athlete.
Susan Schellinck, born Susan Reid on 10 November 1970, is a Canadian former field hockey player who represented Canada at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, finishing seventh, and who was inducted into the Sport Hall of Fame at Nanaimo Museum. She has an encyclopedia entry. The Daily Mail’s investigations editor does not.
That is the whole reason 200 people a month type the journalist’s name next to the word Wikipedia and find nothing useful.
Age, family and private life
Nothing is published, and the guesses are wide.
Aggregator sites estimate her at between forty and fifty based on nothing more than photographs, which is not a method. No date of birth appears in any reliable source, and no reliable outlet has published her educational background or early career.
Her marital status, partner and children are equally undocumented. For a reporter who has spent years on organised abuse and organised crime, that is a professional norm rather than an eccentricity.
What is verifiable is the job title, the byline and the body of work, which is unusually large.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Sue Reid? She is the Special Investigations Editor of the Daily Mail, a British investigative journalist known for reporting on grooming gangs in Rotherham and for investigations into migration, asylum accommodation and border policy.
How old is Sue Reid? Not published. No date of birth appears in any reliable source, and the age estimates circulating online are guesses based on photographs.
Is Sue Reid married? Not publicly documented. She has not discussed her marital status or family publicly.
What is Sue Reid best known for? Her reporting on grooming gangs, particularly in Rotherham, and her long-running investigations into asylum and migration for the Daily Mail.
Does Sue Reid have a Wikipedia page? No. The Wikipedia entry under that name belongs to Susan Schellinck, a Canadian field hockey player who competed at the 1992 Olympics.
Where can you read Sue Reid’s work? Under her byline at the Daily Mail, where she has been Special Investigations Editor for a number of years.
She has reported from asylum hotels, a Hungarian border fence and the centre of Rotherham after dark.
The encyclopedia holds her name for someone who played hockey in Barcelona in 1992.