The Forbidden Stories venture was envisioned by Laurent Richard, a French investigative journalist and filmmaker in 2015, after the January 7, 2015, Charlie Hebdo shooting in which 12 people were killed and eleven others were injured - all journalists and cartoonists - by members of terrorist groupAl-Qaeda's branch in Yemen. The offices of Charlie Hebdo were near Richard's workplace. Caruana Galizia died in a car bomb explosion on October 16, 2017. On October 30, 2017, Reporters Without Borders and NGO Freedom Voices Network announced the launch of "Forbidden Stories", a secure encrypted platform that allows threatened journalists to upload their work and secure their data and information. Forbidden Stories, which was founded by Laurent Richard, allows journalists to continue the investigative reporting of "silenced" journalists and to unveil their stories to a wide audience. The purpose of "Forbidden Stories" was to "deter would-be attacks on journalists by backing up their work, and to publicize murders and disappearances of colleagues such as Caruana Galizia". Forbidden Stories continues the "work of killed, imprisoned, or otherwise incapacitated journalists". Richard said the Daphne Project was modeled after similar initiatives in the past involving the murder of other journalists, such as the Arizona Project, in which 38 American journalists completed the investigative work of Don Bolles following his 1976 murder. In 2015 colleagues of Khadija Ismayilova of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project continued her work on "the corruption and tax evasion of the ruling family in Baku" through The Khadija Project, after she was imprisoned in Azerbaijan. Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo, a Brazilian investigative journalism NGO, carried on the work of Tim Lopes who was burned alive for his work on drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro in 2002. On April 17, 2018, Forbidden Stories launched The Daphne Project by publishing the first of a series of reports by a consortium of 45 journalists from 18 news outlets to complete Caruana Galizia's investigative work. The Daphne Project journalists "work to unpack the circumstances of Caruana Galizia’s murder and expose the web of corruption in Malta that made it possible". In March 2018, the Forbidden Stories project received the “journalism project of the year” grand prize at the French Annual Journalism Summit.
Publications
Richard's article "A warning to the corrupt: if you kill a journalist, another will take their place", was published in The Guardian on April 16, 2018. It was the first in the series and Richard's message was to let "those who tried to halt Daphne Caruana Galizia’s work in Malta" know that they failed. On April 17, The New York Times published a lengthy article, "In Journalist's Murder, a Test for Malta, and the European Union", citing a European Parliament report, "The brutal assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia was aimed at instilling fear in everyone, especially those involved in investigating and prosecuting cases of money laundering and corruption." The Times described Galizia as, "ated by many but read by all, her post about had 547,146 page views; Malta has 460,000 people." Reuters in-depth April 17 publication entitled "The silencing of Daphne", included a production crew with photography and video. Reuter cited European Union parliament member, Ana Gomes, who led an EU mission to Malta in 2016, to "examine the rule of law and progress on preventing money-laundering". She said, "The culture of impunity in Malta... fosters corruption, organised financial criminality and state capture. And it was that culture that created the conditions for the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia." In their November 9, 2018, OCCRP article, Reuters journalists, Stephen Grey and Tom Arnold, revealed that Reuters and The Daphne Project had obtained documents showing details about 17 Black Limited, a company that Galizia had mentioned in her blog eight months before she was killed. The documents showed that Konrad Mizzi—Malta's energy minister from 2013 to 2016—and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Keith Schembri, "owned two Panamanian companies and expected to get payments from an offshore company connected" to Yorgen Fenech, CEO of Tumas Group, that had won a large Malta government concession to build a multi-million dollar gas power plant on Malta. Mizza, Schembri, and Fenech deny any wrongdoing. This story was confirmed by The Malta Independent.
Members
Most Daphne Project journalists have also worked with International Consortium of Investigative Journalists or the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative journalists. They have worked with major news outlets, such as Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, the Times of Malta, and "top papers in France, Italy, and Germany", a collaborative effort to complete Caruana Galizia's investigative work. Pulitzer Prize-winning German investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer with the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, helped found the Forbidden Stories platform and serves as Vice President.
In Venice on August 30, 2019 Meryl Streep, who has the lead role in Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat, which is about Mossack Fonseca, praised the investigative reporting of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Streep said that even though The Laundromat is a dark comedy, it will draw attention to the work of "about 300 international investigative reporters who broke the story in 2016". She said, "People died and people die still to get the word out. This movie is fun and it’s funny but it’s really, really, really important." In the film, which premiered on September 1 in Venice, Streep's character is a Texan widow who inadvertently exposes the directors of Mossack Fonseca as she seeks answers about her late husband's savings. Jürgen Mossack is played in the film by Gary Oldman, and Antonio Banderas plays Ramón Fonseca. Soderbergh's inspiration for the dark comedy was Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Dr. Strangelove, a political satire about the Cold War and nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Soderbergh said that, "a dark comedy would have the best possible chance of remaining in the minds of the viewers and also gave us the opportunity to use the complexity of these kind of financial activities almost as a joke, almost as a setup for a punchline. Otherwise viewers would feel as if they were being educated as opposed to entertained."
