Laurent Richard is a journalist, executive producer of investigative documentaries, founder and executive director of Forbidden Stories. For more than 20 years, Laurent Richard has been conducting international investigations and major reports 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 “GI’S in Iraq: Forbidden Words” ( “GI’s en Irak, Paroles Interdites”). Laurent Richard 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 clandestine actions carried out by Mossad or the CIA… In 2011, he co-founded the award-winning investigative magazine “Cash Investigation” broadcast on French public television. In 2015, he won the prize for best investigation at FIGRA for his documentary “My president is on a business trip”. An investigation into human rights violations and corruption rampant in Azerbaijan. The same year, on 2015 January 7th, Laurent, who was working at the news agency Premières Lignes, next door to the Charlie Hebdo team, arrived on the scene a few minutes after the terrorists had left the building. Laurent and some of his colleagues went to the Charlie Hebdo newsroom immediately to help the survivors of the attack, most of whom were journalists like themselves. This traumatic experience convinced him of the need to create a worldwide organization whose mission would be to continue the work of the murdered journalists. In 2016, he was awarded by the University of Michigan a one-year Knight Wallace 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, jailed or threatened. On November 2, 2017, the Forbidden Stories consortium was born at a launch conference in Washington DC. Since its creation, Laurent and his team have been able to raise more than four millions US dollars to ensure the development of Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit that now employs 12 full-time staff and coordinates investigations with 150 reporters and more than 60 news organizations including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde and many others.