Biography
Educated at the School of the Sacred Heart and at Columbia University — where she majored in Political Science with a minor in Latin American history — and holder of a Certificate of Studies from the Harvard Business School “Program on Negotiations”, Conchita Sarnoff Woolsey has devoted the past two decades to the defence of human dignity and to the fight against the exploitation of the most vulnerable persons.
She began her career in media as a government-affairs account executive at CNN's first foreign bureau in London, later developing multimedia communications programmes for Fortune 500 companies and serving as crisis-communications adviser in high-level political and corporate contexts. Between 2007 and 2009 she created and produced The Americas Forum (subsequently The Region), a half-hour current-affairs debate programme featuring heads of state, policy experts and CEOs on Western Hemisphere foreign-policy issues, and produced a segment for PBS's Spanish-language Oppenheimer Report.
Since 2006 she has worked extensively on public-policy issues concerning human trafficking. In 2010 she published in The Daily Beast the investigative series that first opened to the world the details of the Jeffrey Epstein case — reporting she continued for almost a decade in the face of repeated threats. Her book TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein Case (Post Hill Press / Simon & Schuster) has become a reference work on the intersection between trafficking, impunity and the abuse of power. In 2010 she was nominated for The Deadline Club Award for best investigative reporting.
She is founder and Executive Director of the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking (ATRVT), a Washington, D.C. non-profit organisation dedicated to raising awareness of human trafficking and to ending the sexual exploitation of children. In 2019 she co-founded, with Professor Katharine Donato of Georgetown University, the Human Trafficking Research Center and Clinical Program, and she has served as a graduate faculty member at American University, Washington D.C., teaching Human Trafficking in Global Society.
A regular contributor and commentator, she has written for The Financial Times, The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, The Latin America Herald Tribune and others, and has appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, PBS, BBC, Univision, Telemundo and Caracol. She is married to Ambassador R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence of the United States, and lives in Washington, D.C.
Within AEGIS, Conchita Sarnoff Woolsey contributes to the Steering Committee her unparalleled experience in the defence of vulnerable persons, her transatlantic network of policy-makers, journalists and academic institutions, and a moral clarity earned in some of the most difficult investigations of our time — a decisive voice as the Foundation works to place ethics, regulation and human dignity at the very centre of the coming age of Artificial Intelligence.