Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed three years ago today. The assassination threw the country into political turmoil it has yet to emerge from. Claudia Calleja spoke to close relatives, friends and colleagues for a look at the woman who yielded the powerful pen.
She loved gardening, studied archaeology to put her mind to something new and had a passion for magazines. This is how her friends and relatives knew the ordinary Daphne Caruana Galizia.
“Her blog didn’t define her. Behind the blog there was a real person, with a family, friends and wide-ranging interests. She loved gardens and gardening, books and reading, travel and art,” her sister, Corinne Vella, says.
Daphne’s extraordinary journalism, though, meant that, before and after the murder, the mother of three was the subject of a politically driven propaganda aimed at dehumanising her.
“When you dehumanise someone, it makes it easier to target and isolate such person. They dismissed her as ‘one woman with a laptop’. But look at the impact she had.”
Daphne, her sister adds, always loved the magazine world.
“She had written an editorial in one of her magazines about how that began. As children, we’d spend months cutting up magazines to prepare confetti for the feast of St Paul, which we celebrated at our grandparents’ home in Valletta. Daphne began to look at the magazines themselves. What they were about, how they were put together.”
Daphne loved to read but she had a special liking for magazines that, in those pre-internet days, offered a way to keep up with the world.
In 2004, she started her own food magazine, Taste, followed by the design and interiors magazine Flair, later merged into Taste&Flair.
“She liked planting something and seeing it grow and she loved untamed gardens.”
She lost her life because she acted as the tip of the spear, fighting a monster we are yet to fully comprehend
Daphne once wrote: ‘I love gardens: mysterious, magical gardens full of nooks and crannies… The hard-wiring for this pattern in my preference was probably, I now realise, set by the time I was in primary school and my imagination captured by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden’.”
Corinne recalls: “When it came to family, she was always very private… She was always up for a laugh. Often, even in a serious situation, she would see the funny side. Till this day, when I see something that would appeal to her sense of humour, my instinct is to tell her all about it but I can’t…”
Petra Caruana Dingli and Daphne had been friends since their late teens.
“Her career began and ended with journalism, with this commitment growing over the years,” Petra says.
“But her mind was often on other things too. For example, after having three children and already working in journalism, she decided to start a university course and surprisingly chose archaeology… she specifically wanted to do something completely different from her usual interests.
“I was also a university student then and I remember many enjoyable conversations with her about our studies and subjects having absolutely nothing to do with politics.”
Experiencing the political tensions of the 1970s and 1980s, Daphne was deeply affected. “This thread is visible in her writings. Her mindset was shaped by that. She was always outraged by any traces of those times that she perceived in current events today.
“She never forgot her sense of dread at the violence and collapse of state institutions that she witnessed as a teenager and young woman.”
It was this sense of outrage at abuse and corruption that fuelled her journalism.
Fellow investigative journalist and former Times of Malta news editor Mark Micallef said: “Daphne as a journalist was absolutely formidable, a tenacious trailblazer and incredibly courageous in a country where this latter trait is particularly short in supply.
“She was also divisive, often unnecessarily so. She was often also one-sided and even cruel in the manner she went after the subjects of her stories, or even bystanders.
“This complexity, coupled with the hyper-divisive way in which we debate most things in Malta, is what leads us to a rut in the discussion on Daphne’s legacy. Perhaps it’s too early, however, we will need to have this debate as a country, to come to terms with the ultimate truth concerning this larger-than-life woman; she died a hero. She lost her life because she acted as the tip of the spear, fighting a monster we are yet to fully comprehend.”
Several months after Daphne was killed, Alfred Degiorgio, his brother George and Vince Muscat were charged with carrying out the murder.
In December 2019, self-confessed middleman Melvin Theuma, a taxi driver from Birkirkara, promised to tell all he knew about his role in the murder in exchange for immunity, which he was granted.
He named Yorgen Fenech – the multi-millionaire former director of Electrogas, Tumas Group and owner of 17 Black – as the mastermind behind the murder. Fenech is pleading not guilty.
Former prime minister Joseph Muscat resigned in the face of massive street protests after alleged links between the murder and his government were revealed.
Daphne is not done yet.