The problem with heroes is that they appear only when you have the misfortune of truly needing them. They’re the people who show up when things have gone sideways. They save people, help people, or stand up for life and liberty despite sometimes terrible costs.
It should come as some relief that there are too many such people to count this year. But as 2025 comes to a close, we wanted to celebrate just a few who moved us.
So, without further ado, we bring you our non-exhaustive list of some of this year’s heroes. Some are well known. Others are not. But they all did something great this year, and for that we at The Free Press thank them. —The Editors
Danielle Sassoon, by Joe Nocera
Danielle Sassoon had as bright a future as one could imagine when, in January 2025, the Justice Department named her to temporarily lead the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office—the most important in the country—while President Donald Trump’s nominee awaited confirmation. She had gone to Yale Law School, clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and prosecuted Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-imprisoned crypto mogul. She was highly regarded by the people she worked with. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a federal appeals court judge for whom she also clerked, described her to The New York Times as “someone who’s very principled and rigorously honest and plays it straight.”
But shortly after being installed in the U.S. Attorney’s chair, she was asked—no, she was told—by her superiors in Washington, D.C., to drop a corruption case against New York mayor Eric Adams. Not because the evidence was lacking but because Adams had apparently cut a deal with the Trump administration to help round up illegal immigrants in the city in return for ending the case against him.
After that demand from the Department of Justice (DOJ), “veterans of the office quickly began to discuss among themselves how Ms. Sassoon might respond,” according to the Times. Her friends, however, had no doubt what she would do. She resigned.
In her resignation letter, she wrote that the order was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.” Since he was reelected, Trump had used the Justice Department as a political vehicle—demanding that political enemies be prosecuted, and convicted friends be pardoned. In refusing to carry out what she saw as the DOJ’s corrupt order, Sassoon showed that integrity still mattered.
