Laurent Richard
Laurent Richard is an investigative journalist, an Emmy-winning documentary producer, and the founder of Forbidden Stories.
- laurent.richard [at] freedomvoicesnetwork.org
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At Forbidden Stories, Laurent oversees and coordinates the global network of partners with the support of a 25-person team. He identifies new avenues for editorial development, envisions paths for structural and impact-driven growth, and represents the organization to donors, the general public, and the media.
Laurent has been conducting international investigations and reporting for television for over 25 years. At the age of 25, he traveled to the Kashmir Valley to report on the conflict between India and Pakistan, as well as to Palestine at the start of the Second Intifada. In 2004, he produced a major investigation for French public television on the Iraq War.
Laurent is also the author of numerous investigations into the lies of the tobacco industry, abuses in the financial sector, human rights violations in Central Asia, threats against Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon, and the clandestine operations of Mossad and the CIA.
In 2011, he co-founded Cash Investigation, the most well-known investigative show broadcast on French public television (France 2).
The terrorist attack on January 7, 2015, against the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo changed his life. The victims were his office neighbors. Arriving at the scene shortly after the terrorists had left the building, Laurent and his colleagues at “Premières Lignes” helped the survivors. Around the same time, several foreign journalists he knew were imprisoned abroad under dictatorial regimes. These events, occurring within the same period, inspired and strengthened his resolve to create a global network of journalists dedicated to continuing the investigations of reporters who had been killed, imprisoned, or threatened.
Following the events of 2015, Laurent proposed this project to the University of Michigan, which awarded him a one-year fellowship. From 2016 to 2017, Laurent laid the foundations for Forbidden Stories and also created the SafeBox Network, a secure digital vault allowing threatened journalists to safeguard their ongoing investigations. If they were prevented from publishing, their work would continue.
The first investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories was The Daphne Project, published in June 2018, several months after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The Daphne Project brought together 45 journalists and 18 media organizations, including The New York Times in the United States and Le Monde in
France. The organization’s message is clear: “You killed the messenger, but you won’t kill the message.”
Since its creation, Forbidden Stories has relied on a network of 300 journalists and 90 media organizations worldwide. The organization has continued the work of murdered journalists in India, Mexico, Ghana, Colombia, Brazil, and more than a dozen other countries. Forbidden Stories and its partners have received numerous awards, including the prestigious European Press Prize, two George Polk Awards, and the RSF Impact Prize for The Pegasus Project, published in 2021.
Laurent Richard has spoken before numerous institutions in France and across Europe, as well as on the campuses of Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. He was named European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin in 2018. He is also the co-author of Pegasus: How a Spy in Our Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy, published in 2023. For the same investigation into the Pegasus spyware, he received an Emmy Award in October 2024 for the PBS Frontline documentary in the category of Outstanding Investigative Documentary.
Laurent is also an Ashoka Fellow, part of an international organization that brings together a community of innovative social entrepreneurs.
Laurent is also the author of numerous investigations into the lies of the tobacco industry, the abuses of the financial sector, human rights violations in Central Asia, threats against indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon, and the clandestine actions of Mossad and the CIA.
In 2011, he co-founded “Cash Investigation”, a news show broadcast on French public television (France 2). For Cash Investigation, he produced a documentary on corruption in Azerbaijan titled “My President is on a business trip” (“Mon président est en voyage d’affaires”), which earned him the 2015 award for best investigation at the Festival International du Grand Reportage d’Actualité. It was notably while shooting this documentary, following the imprisonment of Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, that he became convinced of the need for a journalistic response to attacks on the press.
In 2016, he was selected as a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan. During this year-long fellowship, he developed the concept of a global network of journalists whose mission would be to pursue the investigations of silenced reporters: thus began Forbidden Stories.
He was named European journalist of the year during the 2018 Prix Europa in Berlin for the Daphne Project, which would be the first in a long series of forbidden investigations. Forbidden Stories has since won numerous awards, including the prestigious European Press Prize, the George Polk Award, and the RSF Press Freedom Award for the 2021 Pegasus Project.
As the Executive Director of Forbidden Stories, Laurent leads a Paris-based team of 22 staff members which coordinates investigations with 150 journalists and over 90 media organizations, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Le Monde, among many others. An innovative social entrepreneur, he was elected an Ashoka fellow in 2022, and now is part of the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs.
As a documentary producer, Laurent’s credits include the “Green Blood” series, which won the 2020 Prix Europa for Best European Documentary Series.
He is also the co-author, alongside Sandrine Rigaud, of the book “Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy”, published in January 2023 in the U.S. by Henry Holt and Co.