Laurent Richard is an investigative journalist, documentary producer, and the Director of Forbidden Stories.
Laurent has been carrying out international investigations and reporting for television for over 25 years.
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.
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.