The anxiety of reporting from 7,000 miles away

What it was like to cover the trial of the Kavumu rapists.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. As a subscriber you will have access to bonus content (described here) — including posts like this one.

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(Peter Zelei Images/Getty Images)

I started this post by writing more about the 2017 trial of the monster Frederic Batumike and his men. But I veered into different territory, which is a kind of divergence I’ve realized I need to follow while telling the story of Kavumu again, years after the fact. Sometimes I get lost in writing the events as they happened and have to remind myself of the reason I am publishing Chills: to give the backstory, the look behind the curtain of how journalism gets made — and how the journalist handles the effects of making it.

So here is a post specifically on that, on my experience as the trial took place, on the pain and difficulty of not being at the one place I most wanted to be, probably ever, but could not be — for fear of being killed.