Sallie Bingham

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Sallie Bingham is an American author, playwright, poet and feminist activist. She is the eldest daughter of Barry Bingham, Sr., patriarch of the Bingham family of Louisville, Kentucky which dominated the news media of the city and state for most of the 20th Century.

Though Sallie Bingham is an accomplished writer in her own right, Kentuckians most closely associate her name with the breakup of the Bingham media empire in the 1980s. She waged a continuing battle with her brother, Barry Bingham, Jr., who had tried to remove the female members of the family (including his own wife) from the board of directors of The Courier-Journal (which also owned WHAS television, radio and Standard Gravure printing) because they were not professionals directly involved in the businesses. Sallie's demands to have her share of the empire bought out for increasing amounts, and her increasingly public battles with Barry Jr., finally led their father to sell off the company piece by piece. Her part in that breakup has sometimes made her a point of ridicule within the community; radio personality Terry Meiners, who hosts an afternoon show on the family's old station, has made Sallie Bingham a frequent butt of jokes over the years.

Since the sell-off, Sallie Bingham has turned to writing a wide variety of works. The best known of her seven books to date is Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir (ISBN 1-55783-077-0), her own account of the breakup of the Bingham empire. She has also penned more than a dozen plays, which have been produced by several theaters across the country; the Kentucky Repertory Theatre in Horse Cave has produced several of her plays.