Annual reports

“Across the world, a playbook to silence the press is being refined: block access, discredit, intimidate, surveil, prosecute – and, too often, kill. The intent is always the same: to blind the public by making journalism feel futile, or too dangerous.

But every attack on a journalist is also an admission. It proves that facts threaten power. We built Forbidden Stories for this calculation.

Our mission is simple: when journalists are murdered, jailed, or abducted, we make sure their investigation does not disappear with them. We do not answer enemies of the press with silence or statements. We answer them with journalism.

This past year, we scaled that response. As threats to press freedom rise worldwide, we have published twice as many investigations as we did in 2024. And as always, we did this together, because there is strength in numbers – 97 partner journalists took part in our investigations.

We pursued Viktoriia Roshchyna’s investigation into the thousands of Ukrainian civilians illegally detained by Russia that cost her her life. We exposed Ghana’s illegal gold rush, which has poisoned waterways and destroyed forests while journalists face abductions, beatings or death threats for reporting on it. We investigated organised crime in Paraguay after 19 journalists were killed over the course of three decades, exposing how corruption has infiltrated the country’s justice system itself.

We also continued the work of fellow reporters silenced in Cambodia, Gaza, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Syria, and Turkmenistan.

Millions across the globe read and watched our investigations. What some tried to bury ended up reaching an even wider audience.

This work has had concrete impacts. The European Union sanctioned the jailers of Viktoriia Roshchyna in the “Russian Guantanamo.” It also sanctioned the leaders of Russian disinformation operations in Africa whom we exposed, and former Haitian Senator Rony Célestin, the main suspect in the assassination of Haitian journalist Néhémie Joseph, whose work we carried on.

In the face of those who target journalists, we also invest in prevention. Our SafeBox Network now protects the information of over 230 threatened journalists from nearly 40 countries, so that from now on, their investigations are unstoppable. They want anyone who threatens them to hear this loud and clear.

One striking example is Ecuadorian journalist Tamia Villavicencio, whose media outlet La Fuente recently joined our SafeBox Network. In a video that went viral on social media, she warned her father’s killers – himself a journalist – that silencing her would only amplify their wrongdoings worldwide.

The SafeBox Network has become a one-of-a-kind deterrent. We must expand it to make it useful for many more threatened and isolated reporters.

In the year ahead and in the years to come, we will focus on systematizing our response to crimes committed against journalists – bringing us closer to our moonshot goal: to publish an investigation each time a journalist is killed, imprisoned or abducted. The more automatic our response is, the more dissuasive we will be.

Finally, as you will read in this report, in 2025, we worked to bring our mission to new audiences through original formats. We brought our investigations on stage, organized an exhibition on the Gaza Project, co-published a one-hundred page magazine, and ran an advertising campaign in the Paris metro.

None of this would be possible without this extraordinary community of journalists, editors, partners and supporters around the world – and without the remarkable dedication of the Forbidden Stories team, whose work makes these investigations possible every day.

The enemies of the press want to teach journalists a lesson. Together, let’s teach them a different one: Killing the journalist won’t kill the story.”