Jennifer Wadsworth

Baton Rouge, San Francisco

Senior Editor at The San Francisco Standard

senior editor @sfstandard. previously @theadvocatebr @metronewspaper @sanjoseinside. bylines @washingtonpost @thedailybeast @sfgate etc.

Articles

Selling desperation: These home insurers deny claims at shocking rates

2 weeks ago | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

As insurers flee the state, once-obscure, unregulated carriers have stepped up to take their place. And they're denying an extraordinary number of claims. Michelle Fuller banked everything on the three-bedroom Victorian on 15th Street in the Castro, which she bought in 2005 for $985,000. After her only child left for college, Fuller downsized to a small apartment but didn’t sell the home. She hired a property manager and rented it out.
Revealed: Landlord group hired paid protesters to oppose rent control

4 weeks ago | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

By Jennifer WadsworthPublished Apr. 16, 2025 • 6:00amJackson Brody was combing Craigslist for work when he stumbled across an ad for a paid gig in the East Bay. Pocket $250 for one evening close to home? Seemed almost too good to be true. Hours after replying to the ad, the 27-year-old got a late-night callback.
‘Our last chance’: SF fertility clinic lost embryos, lawsuits say

1 month ago | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

The allegations come amid a national wave of litigation against clinics and companies involved in IVF as industry growth outpaces regulation. The allegations about Chang’s unsettling appointment on May 22, 2024 — detailed in one of two new lawsuits against Spring Fertility’s Bay Area clinics — come amid a national wave of litigation targeting clinics and companies involved in the fertility process as the industry’s growth outpaces regulation.
‘Gross retro transphobia’: Another SF spa is accused of discrimination

2 months ago | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

Calder Storm was lounging in a hot tub with a friend at Imperial Day Spa when two attendants approached him with a question: “Are you transgender?” The employees told him they received a complaint and said Storm, who is transmasculine and has a state ID to back it up, would have to leave. The exchange that followed was caught on a video that’s racking up thousands of views on YouTube.
52 hours in the ER: Cancer patient's wait highlights staffing shortfall at UCSF

2 months ago | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

It began with a slight change of gait. “I put my foot on the floor, and it felt weird — like my brain wasn’t telling my foot what was happening,” Marisa recounted. As a 63-year-old cancer survivor, she knew enough to err on the safe side. So, on her nurse’s advice to go to the hospital where she’d been treated by oncologists, she drove from her home in El Cerrito over the Bay Bridge and through San Francisco to the emergency department at UCSF Parnassus in the Inner Sunset.
'Devastating': Trump research funding cuts could cost the Bay Area billions

Feb 14, 2025 | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth |Noah Baustin

New rules would strip upward of $138 million from UCSF in one year, according to The Standard’s analysis of federal data. UCSF neurology professor Adam Boxer anxiously faced the prospect of having to call off a landmark clinical trial before it started — one that could lead to the first effective drugs for a deadly brain disease. A Feb.
Bay Area chiropractor accused of sexually abusing students

Feb 9, 2025 | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

After a teacher groomed and abused her during high school, a young woman turned to chiropractic care to reconnect with her body. It was so effective that she enrolled at Life Chiropractic College West in hopes of helping other survivors heal. Instead, she says, she found herself reliving the trauma when a professor molested her at his private practice. When she tried to report the assault, the school ignored her, she says.
SF's only burn unit sent kids to other hospitals for months

Jan 29, 2025 | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

San Francisco's burn unit - one of the largest in Northern California, and the only dedicated center between San Jose and Sacramento - has quietly sent child patients to other hospitals since last fall, a practice that appears to fly in the face of an agreement with the state attorney general. UCSF Health, which operates the burn unit, discontinued the practice this week, after The Standard began asking about it.
Animal cruelty caught on video at SF seafood markets; city says it can't act

Jan 13, 2025 | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth

Behind the counter at a San Francisco seafood market, a worker picks up a yellow mallet and proceeds to bludgeon a live turtle before hacking into its shell with a meat cleaver. Its legs flinch as the blade strikes. Video from various live-animal shops shows rubber-smocked employees beheading frogs without stunning them first. The grainy footage shows dead fish floating in tanks with others that look like they're dying, conscious frogs getting stuffed into a plastic bag, fish gasping on ice.
SF crews help fight one of most destructive fires in state history

Jan 11, 2025 | sfstandard.com | Jennifer Wadsworth |Max Harrison-Caldwell

San Francisco firefighters are on the front lines of one of the most destructive fires ever in California - a blaze that already killed about a dozen people, burned well over 12,000 buildings, prompted sweeping evacuations in and around Los Angeles, and is still barely contained. The San Francisco Fire Department on Saturday counted 31 staffers dispatched directly to fight the apocalyptic blazes tearing through Southern California, according to Capt. Jonathan Baxter.