Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
This Journalist Was Murdered Over The Panama Papers - The Daphne Caruana Galizia story
17 Mar 2025
The Daphne Caruana Galizia case is a tragic example of the dangers investigative journalists face when exposing corruption. A fearless Maltese journalist, Caruana Galizia was assassinated by a car bomb on October 16, 2017, after reporting on government corruption, money laundering, and political scandals linked to the Panama Papers. Her murder sparked mass protests in Malta, eventually leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat in 2019.
Full Episode
So this journalist was kaboom, unalived with a car bomb because she exposed some government corruption. The story is wild. And crazy enough, it starts in 1903 with this guy, Teddy. Teddy is president of the United States, and he really wants to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans by building a canal.
And so he bullies the country of Colombia into handing over some of their territory, and he has a canal built. Now this territory eventually becomes the country we now know as Panama. And that's great and all, but now Panama has a problem. It needs revenue. And in order to generate revenue, it creates tax laws that help foreign businesses dodge taxes in their home countries.
Now, what does all of this have to do with a car bomb? We'll get there. But first, we gotta fast forward several decades to 1977, where this German lawyer creates this law firm there in Panama. And because of the tax laws there that I just explained, this law firm actually operates legally, but they're still kinda shady, because their main thing is they basically help rich people hide their money.
Now let's fast forward again to 2016, where something crazy happens. An anonymous whistleblower gets a hold of this shady ass law firm's internal documents and they leak them to the public. These documents are known as the Panama Papers. And these Panama Papers expose all kinds of shady this law firm's clients are doing.
And these clients are very well connected people like businessmen and politicians, world leaders, all kinds of powerful people. In fact, there's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to just the people exposed by these documents. And of course, these powerful people are now really pissed off. In fact, they're so pissed off that they're allegedly willing to murder people over this.
But we'll get back to that. First, we got to talk about this woman. Her name's Daphne. And Daphne, she's a journalist at a local newspaper living on the small island of Malta. And as a journalist, Daphne is actually pretty gangster as f**k. She's exposing all kinds of corruption in Malta. She's writing about criminals and drug traffickers, any kind of corruption in politics.
Daphne is there covering it in her column.
here's the problem with that though malta is a pretty small country about 500 000 people so it doesn't take long for her articles to start attracting the wrong kind of attention and the people she's exposing and their affiliates they start confronting her in the street and they're sending her threatening letters sometimes they even show up to her house and they also go after her legally suing her for libel essentially trying to bury her in lawsuits
One time when she's not home, I guess some of them capture her dog and unalive it? And multiple times people try and set her house on fire. But despite all this, Daphne doesn't quit. Even though she knows she has a target on her back, she is determined to keep telling the truth. In fact, over time, she seems to get even more bold because in 2008, she decides to start her own blog.
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