Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford, 61, has admitted that her relentless focus on her career caused her to fail as a mother 'many, many times'. The award-winning journalist, who has covered conflicts from Libya to Ukraine, said she felt she was 'trying to prove myself and show I could do it all'.
Crawford, who is married to former sports journalist Richard Edmondson and has four children aged 21 to 27, spoke candidly about the personal cost of her high-risk career. 'I felt like I was trying to prove myself and show I could do it all,' she said during a rare visit to London from her base in Istanbul.
The journalist, who has won the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year Award five times, is currently promoting her new Sky docuseries 'Women at War'. The series revisits the Yazidi women she first documented in 2014, when ISIS committed what she describes as 'one of the world's biggest acts of genocide in our lifetime'.
'The women were reduced to being animals,' Crawford said of the Yazidi women who were kidnapped, raped and sold into slavery by ISIS. 'They were seen as possessions to be sold and bartered, raped, beaten, abused at will.'
Crawford also recalled her interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2022, describing it as 'cloak and dagger'. She was the first UK reporter to interview him after the Russian invasion, and noted that he was 'snapping' at their translator, revealing his stress.
