Gerri Peev

Who is Gerri Peev?

Gerri Peev is a Bulgarian-born, New Zealand-raised British journalist. Peev is notable for authoring a 7 March 2008 interview in The Scotsman with Samantha Power, a foreign policy advisor to U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama. During an interview, Power said of Obama's Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton: "She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything." Peev included the remark in her article in The Scotsman, despite Power's post facto declaration that it was off the record. Power resigned after the article was published.

The incident opened a debate about journalistic ethics. Peev told MSNBC "I don't know what the convention is in American journalism, but in Britain here we have very firm rules about the fact that generally, you establish whether a conversation or interview is on or off the record before it actually happens. She made some off-the-cuff remarks which were on the record. She even waited for the tape to start recording and then I think once she noticed that they were quite controversial she tried to withdraw just that very remark about Hillary allegedly being a monster."