Journalist Who Uncovered Russia's Antigay Persecution Shockingly Dies at 52

Liz MacKean, the British reporter famed for investigating anti-LGBT persecution in Russia, has died at age 52.

MacKean died Friday of a stroke, the BBC reports.

She was among the first to report on the brutality against LGBT people, especially gay men, in Russia, with her 2014 documentary, Hunted, for the Dispatches program on the U.K.'s Channel 4.

In it, she explored how antigay groups were using hookup apps to lure gay and bisexual men to apartments and other locations where they were then attacked -- reportedly the same way that government authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are now hunting down gay and bi men.

"There's a hunting season," she told a BBC interviewer at the time. "And gay men are the hunted." Antigay groups, such as one calling itself Occupy Pedophilia, see "no difference at all between a homosexual and a pedophile," she explained. "So using that blurred distinction as a justification, they go, as they say, on safari."

Hunted was one of the winners at the Grierson British Documentary Awards in 2014, and in 2015 the U.K. LGBT group Stonewall named MacKean Journalist of the Decade.

MacKean also won acclaim and awards for a 2009 documentary she did with BBC Newsnight producer Meirion Jones and other colleagues on the illegal dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast by Trafigura, an oil trading company, The Guardian notes. The waste had caused illnesses among area residents, and those affected brought a class action suit against the company, which was settled out of court. MacKean, Jones, and four colleagues shared the 2010 Daniel Pearl award for international investigative reporting for the documentary.

Another project with Jones led to MacKean's departure from the BBC. In 2011 they began investigating allegations that well-known DJ Jimmy Savile had sexually abused children, and they eventually put together a program based on what they believed was solid evidence. But the Newsnight editor declined to run their report.

"The episode left Liz feeling let down and isolated by an organisation she had once regarded as a benevolent employer," David Grossman wrote in The Guardian's obituary. "A less hardworking journalist might have accepted an opportunity to take things easy, to wait for the personnel inside the corporation to change, and the office politics to change with them. That was not Liz's way. She hated to waste time." She left the BBC in 2013, going on to work for Channel 4.

Grossman offered additional praise for her: "In an industry full of egos and elbows, Liz was a campaigning journalist without even the smallest measure of sanctimony or self-regard. It was the victims who were always given the limelight in her work. It was their cause, not her career, that was paramount. Indeed, she sometimes pursued her targets at great cost to her career."

MacKean is survived by her wife, Donna Rowlands; they were together for 22 years and married after the U.K. legalized same-sex marriage in 2014. Also surviving are their daughter, Alex, and son, Will, along with MacKean's parents and three sisters.