Hard-working journalist Marie Torre became an important part of journalism's history--and a temporary celebrity-- in 1959 when she became the first U.S. woman to be jailed for refusing to divulge a news source.
Torre was jailed for contempt of court when she defied a court's order to name the source of unflattering comments about singer Judy Garland that she had attributed to a TV executive to whom she had promised confidentiality.
Her sentence was 10 days, during which the nation's media came loudly to her defense. Hers was an early example of many later legal disputes over source confidentiality.
The Brooklyn native had worked in both television and newspapers. She had written a column, was an entertainment writer, and was one of the earliest female TV news anchors in the nation--at Pittsburgh's station KDKA-TV. At the time of her contempt sentence, she was reporting for the International Herald Tribune out of New York City.
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