Her husband, Peter, a lawyer, had left her a stack of blank checks with his signature. He sometimes got so caught up in his work that he forgot to eat.ĭaphne set down the plate and put on her shoes to go to the bank.
An expert on shell companies, he had shared a Pulitzer Prize for the Panama Papers leak. He was thirty-one, a computer scientist and a journalist himself. On the afternoon of October 16, 2017, Daphne prepared a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella for Matthew, her eldest son. (Her surname, Caruana Galizia, had become redundant-everyone knew her as Daphne.) “The greatest difficulties I encounter come from the fact that they have made me into what in effect is a national scapegoat,” she once said. There was little serious effort to refute Daphne’s reports-only to disdain her as an élitist, partisan fraud. People in his office used their work computers to post cruel gossip about her, accompanied by unflattering photographs. In recent years, he and his Cabinet had sought to smother her with libel lawsuits. In late 2016, Politico Europe included Daphne-along with George Soros, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Sadiq Khan-on its list of “people who are shaping, shaking and stirring Europe.” She was “the blogging fury,” the list read, “a one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta, an island nation famous for both.”īut her subjects were her neighbors-the Prime Minister lived just down the hill. Her blog, Running Commentary, laced deep investigations with withering taunts, and had an online readership as large as all of Malta’s newspapers combined. “Malta is 17 miles by nine and flooded with cocaine, corruption, and filthy money,” she wrote. She had come to think of the country as fractured by time, with all the worst elements of globalization grafted onto a population that was otherwise stuck in the past. They simply knew her as is-sahhara tal-Bidnija-the witch of Bidnija.īeyond “this little rock,” as Daphne referred to Malta, she was known for her reporting, which exposed malfeasance and hypocrisy within the governing class. All over the island, there were people who were certain that they hated her but had never read a word she had written. She took refuge in a monastery, where the villagers pounded on the heavy wooden doors.
Once, when she was taking an afternoon walk in a nearby village, a former mayor gathered a mob and began chasing her. When she left the house, people spat at her, followed her, photographed her, and hurled insults and abuse.
But she hadn’t been to the beach in four years. From the dining-room table, where Daphne wrote, she could see the morning sunlight glisten on the Mediterranean. She was fifty-three and lived in an old stone farmhouse on the edge of Bidnija, a hilltop hamlet on the island of Malta. Almost all the family is afraid of her in one way or another.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.ĭaphne’s sons worried about her.
Stuckfan Fandoms: Stuck in the Middle (TV)