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NAME:
Sheila O’Donnell
NICKNAME:
“Dickless Tracy”
BIGGEST TURNAROUND:
From private girls school to private eye
CLAIM TO FAME:
Investigates attacks on environmentalists
IN HER LINE OF FIRE:
The anti-enviro “Wise Use” movement

Greenpeace U.S.A.’s Pat Costner was about to release a critical report on toxic incinerators four years ago when her Arkansas home was burned to the ground. After local authorities found nothing suspicious, Costner hired private eye Sheila O’Donnell. Her subsequent investigation revealed a fuel can and the trail of an accelerant. The arsonists have yet to be caught, but O’Donnell “saved my sanity,” says Costner.

O’Donnell began specializing in ecoterrorist attacks–ranging from the attempted assassinations of environmentalists to the poisoning and decapitation of their pets–five years ago. “When I saw how outrageously people were being treated, it didn’t make me retreat at all,” says the Bay Area detective. “It made me want to stand with them.”

O’Donnell, 50, is an unlikely candidate for private dick. She survived a Catholic girls high school near Boston before dropping out of several colleges–“It was the ’60s,” she explains. Her progressivism was shaped by a strong identification with Irish oppression, coupled with what she saw as the “blatant” class and gender inequity of the draft process. At 23 she moved to Washington, D.C., to work with an anti-war group.

The experience left O’Donnell deeply suspicious of the FBI and prompted her turn toward independent investigation. Her findings in a 1990 car bombing that injured two members of Earth First!, a popular FBI target because of its radical–some would say terrorist–tactics, contradicted the FBI and helped exonerate the pair. “Earth Firsters have gotten a bad rap,” she says, noting that many of its members have spoken out against tree-spiking, its most controversial operation. “They’re much more into theater. They do things to be in people’s faces.”

O’Donnell, featured in David Helvarg’s “The War Against the Greens,” worked at two detective agencies before joining Ace Investigations eight years ago. “Women are well-adapted to be investigators. We have to keep our wits about us when we walk down the street, because we know full well that some jerk can jump out from behind a bush, or a tree, or a car.”

It’s a fear shared by environmentalists like Costner. As attacks against them continue to rise, O’Donnell is busier than ever. “Most activists are infuriated by the fact that thugs are doing this,” she says, “and they don’t back down.” Lucky for her clients, neither does she.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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