Leslie Ray Griffith (January 1, 1956 – August 10, 2022) was an American writer and journalist. She worked for 22 years at KTVU in the San Francisco Bay Area as a reporter and as a news anchor.
Born in Tomball, Texas, Griffith worked her way through college as a single mother, working as a cleaner.[1]
She began her career in the newspaper business as a journalist for the Associated Press and the Denver Post. Her first television jobs were in Grand Junction, Colorado, and in the Monterey-Salinas market of California. In 1986 she became a weekend reporter and anchor at KTVU in Oakland, California; in March 1996 she became co-anchor of the Ten O'Clock News with Dennis Richmond.[2][3] For nine years she was sole anchor of the weekend news; on her 25th birthday, she was in Moscow reporting on the Cold War. She resigned from the station in 2006, after 22 years.[3][4]
She continued to write for news publications, including The Huffington Post[5] and the San Francisco Chronicle[6][7]
For many years, she was concerned with the problem of tuberculosis in circus elephants.[6] She published an article on the issue in 2007[8] and later wrote and directed the award-winning documentary, When Giants Fall.[9]
In 2005, she established the Leslie R. Griffith Woman of Courage Scholarship to help young women.[1]
She had a small part as a TV anchor in the 1999 film True Crime.[10]
Griffith and her first husband divorced after two years of marriage.[1] She had two daughters and a son. She died on August 10, 2022, in Lake Chapala, Mexico, from the effects Lyme disease, which she had contracted in 2015; she moved to Mexico in 2016.[2][6]
