Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Paul Caruana Galizia
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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Paul Caruana Galizia was always hesitant to follow his mother into journalism. “I privately always liked the idea of writing for a living and reporting for a living,” he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “But when I lived in Malta and when my mother was alive, I really had this strong sense that I didn’t want to be compared to her.”
That all changed when Paul’s mother Daphne Caruana Galizia, a pioneering investigative journalist in her native Malta, was assassinated in 2017. The murder sparked an international outcry as Daphne’s death became a symbol of the struggle for freedom of expression. “I wonder, would I have ended up in journalism if it weren’t for the murder? I just don’t know,” Caruana Galizia continues. “Certainly the murder is what drove me into the specific kind of journalism I do now and the stories I’m interested in.”
“Would I have ended up in journalism if it weren’t for the murder? I just don’t know.”
His mother, explains Caruana Galizia, was “the first woman to write a political column, the first columnist to write in their own name. Because even up until then, there were no bylines in the papers out of fear of violent reprisals.”
As a child, he and his two brothers learned that his mother’s work had violent repercussions: the family dog’s throat was slit, they would receive human excrement through the letter box, and their house was subjected to multiple arson attacks.
Daphne, however, would not be deterred, Caruana Galizia explains. “My mother made this very conscious decision that if she was going to become a journalist, it would be to break these norms. The things that drove her into journalism, the ones that frustrated her — the cultures of fear and silence — she had to break them.”
This was more challenging in a tiny country like Malta, whose population to this day only numbers in the hundreds of thousands. “My mother would take us to a restaurant, and you’d sit at the table and look over to the next table and it would be someone my mother had written about,” recalls Caruana Galizia.
After Daphne’s assassination in a car bomb attack, Caruana Galizia chose to commit fully to investigating his mother’s murder, acknowledging that it would mean giving up the privacy and anonymity of himself and his family. “We just had to accept that things were going to change permanently,” he says.
Caruana Galizia wrote a book, “A Death In Malta,” and created a podcast series for Tortoise Media investigating the circumstances around his mother’s death. As a result of Caruana Galizia’s work, as well as dozens of other journalist colleagues working across the globe, three people ended up being jailed for Daphne’s murder, while others await trial. Furthermore, the investigation revealed an attempted coverup of the assassination that went all the way to the top of the Maltese state, which ultimately resulted in the resignation of the sitting prime minister.
“The most horrible period after the murder was this period when we had no names,” Caruana Galizia says. “I feel closure in the sense I know what happened. I know who did what.”