Laurent Richard is a journalist, executive producer of investigative documentaries, founder and executive director of Forbidden Stories.

For more than 20 years he has been conducting international investigations and major stories for television. At the age of 25, he left for the Kashmir valley to film the conflict between India and Pakistan, and for Palestine when the second Intifada broke out. In 2004, he made a resounding investigation for French public television entitled GIs in Iraq: Forbidden Words.

In 2016, he was selected by the University of Michigan where he obtained a one-year fellowship during which he developed the idea and concept of a global network of journalists whose mission is to pursue the investigations of reporters who have been murdered, imprisoned or threatened. In November 2017 the Forbidden Stories consortium was born at a launch conference in Washington DC.

The first investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories was the Daphne Project, published in June 2018, several months after the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The Daphne Project brought together 45 journalists and 18 media outlets including the New York Times in the United States and Le Monde in France. The message of the organization is: “You killed the messenger, but you won’t kill the message”.

Since its creation, Forbidden Stories has received numerous awards, including the prestigious European Press Prize, the Georges Polk Award and the RSF Impact Prize for the Pegasus Project, published in 2021. As a documentary producer, Laurent has produced, among others, the series Green Blood, which won the Prix Europa for the best European documentary series in 2020.

Laurent has spoken at numerous institutions in France and Europe as well as on the campuses of Harvard, Yale University and Michigan. He was named European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin in 2018.

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