By The stage is dark, except for the beams of faint white light that illuminate four actors standing in a row, who are taking turns to tell the stories of the murdered journalists they play. Reporters from different corners of the world, shot, decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive because of their work.
That was the powerful opening sequence of the show “Behind the Scenes of Forbidden Stories,” which was staged at Paris’ Concorde Theater in mid-February and focused on the French nonprofit media site’s efforts to continue the investigations of journalists who have been killed or silenced.
The performance, conceived by the Forbidden Stories team alongside French director and playwright Mélody Mourey, brilliantly combined recited monologues, interviews with investigative journalists, videos, audio recordings, and music performances. The goal was “to mix witness accounts and theater,” Mourey tells GIJN.
The production stemmed from an idea by Forbidden Stories founder and executive director Laurent Richard, who wanted to show the importance — and dangers — of investigative journalism to a different audience from the outlet’s usual readership.
“Forbidden Stories is well known among journalists, but not really to the broader public yet. That has to change, because our work is for the general interest,” Richard says. “All creative ways to explain what we do are worthwhile.”
Members of the production and Forbidden Stories staff backstage at the theater. Image: Courtesy of Cebos Nalcakan
Telling the Stories That Would Have Been Silenced
Forbidden Stories, a GIJN member, was founded in Paris in 2017 with the motto: “Killing the journalist won’t kill the story.” It works by identifying investigations all over the world that have been thwarted because the journalists conducting them have been killed, attacked, or threatened. To finish the stories, Forbidden Stories convenes an international task force of reporters from different news outlets, including both small, local papers and large news organizations, such as Reuters or The New York Times.
Its first project continued the work of murdered Maltese reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia. Just eight years later, it now has more than 25 investigations to its name, with topics including environmental crimes in the Global South, corruption, the illegal activities of Mexican drug cartels, and violence against journalists from Rwanda to Gaza.
Forbidden Stories has also set up SafeBox, a secure digital platform where vulnerable journalists can share their material just in case, so that their investigations can be continued should anything happen to them. The platform’s main goal is to discourage attacks, by making it known that a reporter’s work will be published no matter what, and therefore making violence against them pointless. Launched in 2022, Safebox currently boasts more than 170 members, up from 110 less than one year ago.
The theater performance sought to show how some of Forbidden Stories’ investigations were carried out. In a segment about its Gaza Project, journalists Léa Peruchon of Forbidden Stories and Arthur Carpentier of Le Monde guide the audience through the video footage they analyzed and the software they used. Ultimately, they found strong evidence that Israeli forces targeted press infrastructure inside the Gaza Strip on multiple occasions during their military campaign following Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. (In their response to that investigation, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied intentionally targeting journalists, calling the allegation “unfounded.”)
“We wanted to show how collaboration between journalists works but also how, starting from an image, we could trace where the strikes came from, putting together, step by step, a full investigation,” Peruchon explains. This “allows people to get a real sense of what our day-to-day work looks like.”
The production also addressed the challenges of the cooperation-based approach to journalism that Forbidden Stories seeks to promote. One of the monologues focuses on the “lone wolf” mindset of many investigative reporters, who can be loath to share sources, findings, and credit.
But more than anything else, the night at the Concorde Theater was about highlighting the heavy price many investigative journalists end up paying for their reporting.
One of the night’s longest segments was dedicated to Rafael Moreno, a Colombian journalist gunned down in 2022 shortly after he reached out to Forbidden Stories to denounce threats he was receiving. Before he was killed, he had shared his findings on corruption and environmental crimes in Córdoba province where he lived. After he was killed, a group of dozens of journalists continued his investigation, resulting in a flurry of articles that appeared in more than 30 news outlets around the world.
The show also featured on-stage interviews with a son of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Andrew, and with Ferdinand Ayité, a Togolese investigative journalist. Ayité immigrated to France after being jailed in his home country, and whose paper, L’Alternative, has relied on Forbidden Stories for training and to secure sensitive information on SafeBox. “It was very good to be able to speak in front of a large audience, to talk about my story and how useful the collaboration with Forbidden Stories has been for us,” he tells GIJN.
Richard says that, at this moment when populist leaders are actively sowing distrust towards journalists among the general public, he wanted to show that “journalists are taking risks for us all.” US President Donald Trump is quick to demonize what he calls “fake news media,” even labeling them “the enemy of the people.” But as Richard put it from stage at the end of the performance: “Journalists aren’t the enemies of the people. We are the people.”
To get this message across, the production relied on star power, too. Well-known and award-winning French investigative reporter Elise Lucet conducted several of the interviews, and one of the monologues was read by actress Ophélia Kolb of “Call My Agent!” fame.
Award-winning French journalist Elise Lucet (right) conducted interviews onstage, among them were exiled Togolese investigative reporter Ferdinand Ayité. Image: Courtesy of Cebos Nalcakan
Richard and his team said they are satisfied with the impact the production has had so far. The 650-seat theater was packed at the performance with no empty seats. Though tickets were free for the public — to make the journalism more accessible to everyone — the production still paid dividends for Forbidden Stories, as it saw a spike in donations in the following days, thanks to leaflets with a QR code that were handed out to the audience.
Attendees included both people familiar with Forbidden Stories and others who had never heard of it before. Immediately after the show, several people sought out the Forbidden Stories members at the theater to ask about their investigations and where they could be found.
After the Show, Struggles Reman
For Forbidden Stories it was a good night, but the times are challenging. Trump’s rhetoric against journalists is emboldening autocrats around the world, according to Richard. “It’s a world-scale catastrophe,” he explains. “Global journalism has been completely upended by the end of US aid.” And it’s not just a war of words.
The Trump administration’s cuts to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have dramatically reduced the resources available to independent nonprofit media, freezing an estimated $268 million in agreed grants across more than 30 countries.
Global investigative journalism has also been heavily impacted by the reduction in financial support coming from the National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation largely funded by the US Congress that has existed since 1983. Leaders there say the organization can no longer access its accounts at the US Treasury Department — resulting in the suspension of grants to some 2,000 partners around the world. For Forbidden Stories, this resulted in a sudden 10% hole in its budget.
“And yet, at this time of adversity, when access to information is being threatened by far-right populists and disinformation campaigns, we can feel that the public’s interest in what we do is even stronger,” Richard says. Forbidden Stories’ collaborative journalism model, he adds, can provide a response to the deterioration of journalists’ working conditions and financial resources.
Richard would also like Forbidden Stories’ experiment with theater to continue, perhaps by staging a version of the show in the US, to raise funds, but also to increase awareness of the organization’s mission in the Western hemisphere. Journalists have taken to theater stages before, but this production’s format “is something new,” he says.
