James Rainey has reported on multiple presidential elections, the Iraq War, the foster care system and the environment. As a journalist for the L.A. Times, he was part of teams that earned Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of wildfires, the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1997 North Hollywood shootout. He wrote the twice-weekly media column On the Media, covered the film industry for Variety, and reported on climate change for NBC News.
For this episode of The Reporters, Jim chose a story he wrote for the LA Times earlier this month about the LA fires: “Samaritan Scofflaws: They Broke the Law to Stay Inside the Fire Zone, But Saved Houses and Helped Neighbors.” Jim also talks about losing his childhood home to the fires in Malibu (you can read his story on visiting the ruins of his house here). Below are some highlights from our interview.
Welcome, Jim Rainey, to The Reporters. It's really great to have you here. I appreciate your time, especially given everything that's going on in Los Angeles, where you've been covering the fires.
You lead the story with a scene of fire refugees who are approaching this police perimeter in the Palisades. I was intrigued by the idea of this perimeter, a kind of liminal zone between the fire and the non-fire area of this disaster. Can you tell us a little bit about what that perimeter area is like?
Thank you for having me. First of all, I love talking about what I do and I think it's important to share all of this with people, to know more how journalists do what they do.
As your listeners probably know, there were two major fires. The Palisades fire out by the beach and then quite a bit to the east, the Altadena fire.
When the fires come in, they order everyone to evacuate because it's so dangerous. A huge problem in these urban wildfires in California is downed power lines. The flames and smoke inhalation can kill you but so can a downed power line. They set up these perimeters in a pretty wide area to create a safe area, and to make sure that all the power lines are deadened.
“You’re all leaving. [Reporters] are all going in. When we see the flames, we go towards them. We go towards the trouble.”
People caught on the outside have already been able to figure out maybe their house is gone. So these perimeters become very emotional touch points in these already very, very emotional events. People come to these checkpoints and say, “Hey, I left my heart medicine up there. Can't I just go up the hill and get my heart medicine? There's one picture that I have to have, or a document that I need to file my claim with FEMA.” For the most part, the authorities say no, that it's not safe yet, that if we let you in, we're going to have to let everybody in.
One of the perimeters in the Palisades was on Pacific Coast Highway right next to the Getty Villa, which was the locus of this story.
Pretty early on in the piece, we meet your hero, Stephen Foster. How did you find him?
I was out in Malibu where my family had owned a home for 56 years. I had gone out there with my daughter who's a reporter. She wanted to see where her grandmother had lived up until a few months ago. She had some reporting to do; I had some reporting to do. So we went together. Coming back, we went through the Palisades.
One of the things that happens in these fires is that people realize you're getting inside with your press pass. People started to message me, saying, “Hey, here's an address. Can you go look?” A woman that I went to high school with messaged and said, “Can you go to this address?” It was in a planned development, on the border of Palisades and Malibu called Sunset Mesa. Unfortunately, her childhood home was gone, like so many thousands of others. [From a nearby hill], you could look down this sweeping view of hundreds of homes, just vaporized — and the odd ones that are still there.
At the top of the hill, there's a guy in a big Jeep 4x4. He jumps out of the car. He's got a bright red face and a visor on. He is the only civilian that we have seen. We've seen cops, firefighters, and some utility workers. I'm like, “Who are you?” He says, “I'm Steve Foster.” I go, “Well, Steve Foster, how did you get in here? There's this perimeter.” And he says, kind of like Clint Eastwood, “I never left.” At that moment as a reporter, you're like, OK…
“I only regret that I didn't describe him as looking like something out of Mad Max, because the guy looked kind of wild. He looked like a guy who'd been fighting fires for a week.”
We knew there were the people who didn't leave, some of whom died. But when I heard this, I was like, OK, Stephen Foster, what's your number? At that point, he'd probably been in there for five or six days. And he's still there. He hasn't left.
At the next opportunity I called up Stephen Foster and that unfurled the whole story. That's why as a reporter, there's nothing like going there and being there. I only regret that I didn't describe him as looking like something out of Mad Max, because the guy looked kind of wild. He looked like a guy who'd been fighting fires for a week. His eyes were bloodshot. I was like, this is almost certainly a story. That's how it all got started.
Jim reporting from the LA fires
It's really poignant. Having just visited your own childhood home, a figure pops up who's just undeniably a story. I wanted to linger on that for a minute, especially for young journalists who are learning about the craft. That's such a key moment.
When people in uniform show up and say, “Get the hell out of here, your lives are in danger,” most people are pretty compliant.
“If a lot of trigger warnings are needed for you, don't go into journalism. Journalism is about throwing yourself into precarious places emotionally and literally.”
There are some specifics about this guy's case that made him relatively safe in doing something you shouldn't do. I named him the Samaritan Scofflaw. He was a good Samaritan but he was a lawbreaker. Once the authorities order you out of an evacuation zone, they technically could put handcuffs on you. He was a scofflaw but he did a lot of things that made him not your garden variety scofflaw.
Why did he choose to stay behind?
I couldn't quite plumb deep into the recesses of his soul. But the answer he gave and the logical answer is that he thought he could do good. This was his childhood home. His back fence literally [abutted] the Getty museum. He had just remodeled. His mother lived with him, his wife, two kids. He'd done all this work. He had the house just the way he wanted it. It's maybe 200-300 yards up from the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t want to take a chance that it was gonna burn. He thought he could manage things. He had some pretty good heavy-duty hoses. He had a bit of defensible space behind his home. If he had to, at the last minute, he could bail out and drive straight to the ocean and jump in, which is a pretty good fire break. The firefighters on the scene didn't want to say, “He's right.” But they clearly didn't say he was wrong.
“The air was just chewable. It was thick with smoke and embers.”
He took a calculated risk that he would make it through this hellacious night. The flames came into his backyard lit a pretty good size eucalyptus tree on fire three times. His 21-year old son stayed with him. Other things were catching fire in their area of their house and their neighbors houses. So he and his son ran up and down the block to other people's houses. They put out little hotspots and little spot fires, which are what lead to bigger fires. The firefighters said he probably helped save up to 10 homes. That's pretty cool, in this time where we think of people often as being pretty selfish and pretty self-involved.
That’s something that I, as a reporter, like to write about these days in a time where there's a lot of bad happening in the world. A lot of our job is to expose the bad that's happening and to try to correct it. Well, one of the corrections is for people to be really good neighbors and to do the right thing, even when they're kind of technically doing the wrong thing. So that was what attracted me to this guy. As a reporter, you have to check it out. The firefighters corroborated everything he said.
One of his neighbors called him Saint Stefan, Saint Stefano, Saint Stephen.
You talk about him and his son running around in the middle of the fire with shovels and pickaxes, wearing snowboarding goggles as makeshift protective gear.
The little details make the story, right? You can say the air was filled with embers and it was hot…but if you say someone put on snowboard goggles, everybody knows what those look like and it is very evocative. Instead of being out snowboarding together, they're fighting a fire. More detail is always your friend. Show, don't tell. If someone has to put on ski goggles to protect their eyes, that shows people.
“One person called us [reporters] the ‘enemy of the people’— it's just such a fabrication and an abomination against the truth.”
It was hot and it was nasty and the air was just chewable. It was thick with smoke and embers. I'm a father of three kids, two boys and a girl. And to see this father and son. The amount of love and support that they gave each other. It choked me up as they told me about it because men in particular sometimes don't express that kind of thing. And both the father and son were so expressive. Stephen said, “I knew my kid could play video games for eight hours straight, but I didn't know he could fight a fire for 22 hours.”
At one point you quote the son saying, “Well, it wasn't a one man job. I had to be here to help my dad.”
Colton, the son, is a very slight young man. He's got little sort of Harry Potter glasses and he doesn't look like a macho swaggering kid who’s not scared of anything. He’s a very sensitive thoughtful young man. This is something they will never forget. They've been snowboarding a lot together, skiing together, but you're never gonna forget the night you stayed up all night to save a house with your dad, right?
A theme is the good and bad that happens in the face of disaster. We have people who try to loot. They go into the neighborhoods and try and steal from people. We have shysters who try to get government funds that they don't deserve. But we also have people like Stephen and Colton Foster who are just stepping up and doing the right thing. This story got a ton of response. We need more of this. There's a lot of divisiveness in our country and a lot of finger pointing. That's already happening with the fires, and there should be an examination, and there will be. But for me as a reporter who gets to write about a lot of negative things, it's quite a relief to write about something that goes right.
You lead the story by talking about refugees. Then we have people like Stephen Foster and Colton, otherwise ordinary people doing extraordinary things in an extraordinary time. You have looters taking advantage of a bad situation. In so many ways, it's like a war zone — a devastating, awful situation and you see the best and the worst of people. War reporters are accustomed to those kinds of situations. But when a disaster strikes an American city and suddenly all the reporters in town are thrust into a really difficult situation, what that was like?
An event like this forces you to think about it. The reason people who admire police and especially firefighters is because they are the people who go in when everyone else leaves. I get emotional talking about this. Reporters go in too! Reporters go in with no other objective than to tell the truth, to tell the story, and in ways that help people understand a very difficult situation.
Sometimes, these are the immediate things they need to know, like roads that are closed, evacuation routes that they can and can't take. A story like this though, the emotional impact of it and how do you cope with a disaster and bucking people up. I think it's really important that people know reporters don't go in there with any bad intent. The exact opposite.
“The story became about this time and place of my youth that was all mostly gone. In the midst of this sadness, it was weirdly pleasurable to be able to tell that story.”
Most of our stuff on the L.A Times was put up for free on the website because it's a disaster and we wanted people to have the information. Right now you can get the LA Times, I think for $60 a year, $1 a week, essentially. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, it's worth it.
We're one of the best news organizations in America and really in the world. In a crisis like this, people are seeing how important it is to have good, accurate information.
I don't think people get it. You're all leaving. We're all going in. When we see the flames, we go towards them. We go towards the trouble. Journalists deserve more credit for that. One person called us the “enemy of the people”— it's just such a fabrication and an abomination against the truth.
I applaud your work. Did you run into any challenges when you were reporting this or other stories related to the fire?
As a reporter, you need a signal on your phone or your computer so that you can get your information out to the outside world. You need power for your devices — either your phone or your laptop. You also have to fuel yourself. I have credentials which identify me. You have to really slow down enough to have situational awareness. We want to get the information out there first. On the first day of the fire, I didn't even take the time to fire up my laptop. I dictated a story into my phone which I then copied and sent via Slack message to a great young reporter for us named Brittny Mejia, who's just a fabulous young reporter for the LA Times. You just keep plowing ahead until you see what is obviously a story, like with Stephen Foster.
You lost your own childhood home in Malibu. What it was like to report on a story that you were so intimately affected by?
To tell the truth, I would say it was one of the easiest. It wasn't easy emotionally because there was a lot of sadness around what had happened — that's a major point of the story.
My family moved out there up this canyon when I was 10 years old and I lived there until I was 18. My parents continued to live there. My dad died in 2005. My mom died just short of 92, in May. We were trying to decide what to do with it. We were kind of getting it ready to maybe put it on the market — and boom, it burned up. So this was a chance to talk about a place I grew up in. But it's not just a love note. It's a place I had weird feelings about. With time it's gotten more and more expensive. The beach down below where we lived is known as Billionaires Beach. That's one part of Malibu.
“There’s a misnomer that you’re Kardashian-adjacent if you lived in Malibu.”
But my dad came from blue-collar roots. They bought that house for $68,000. So, it is what you think it is, but it's something completely different too. It was important to me to tell that story. I think there's like a misnomer that you're Kardashian-adjacent if you lived in Malibu. When I lived there we had heat but my dad was too cheap to turn the heat on and we lived like country folk almost. We had beehives. We sold honey. The story became about this time and place of my youth that was all mostly gone. In the midst of this sadness, it was weirdly pleasurable to be able to tell that story.
Jim’s father trying to save his home in the 1993 Malibu fire. The family lost their home in the 2025 fire
I'm wondering if you're up for a very quick lightning round, Jim?
Let's do it.
Your daily required reading list.
LA Times, of course, New York Times, Washington Post. I do check in with Fox News and Breitbart. I read a little bit of everything.
Your favorite opinion columnist.
George Will and Peggy Noonan. Closer to home, at the LA Times, my friend Steve Lopez, a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Gustavo Arellano, Robin Abcarian, Mark Barabak, Michael Hiltzik, our Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist.
Guilty media pleasure?
Andy Borowitz formerly of the New Yorker. I also tune in a fair amount to Steve Schmidt, former top adviser to John McCain and a Republican.
Favorite story by another reporter?
My colleague Laura Nelson has a story that starts with the first sparks of the fire and carries you through several days later.
Favorite research tool?
Google. The California voter registration database.
Words of wisdom for aspiring reporters?
Be open to everything and when your editor comes to you, don't say no. It's really valuable in our business to have people that can do everything and anything and are willing to say yes. If a lot of trigger warnings are needed for you, don't go into journalism. Journalism is about throwing yourself into precarious places emotionally and literally.
Great advice. Number one “don't do?”
Don't lie. Tell the truth and admit what you don't know. Admit your ignorance. Be vulnerable in every way. Don't pretend you know things that you don't, because it'll get you in trouble when you start writing.
What book are you reading right now?
A history written by an indigenous man from the Great Lakes region.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you so much.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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