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From investigating violence alleged to have been committed by famous and powerful sports stars in Germany to uncovering the realities of femicide in Brazil, and unravelling digital clues to find out how the online celebrities of the "manosphere" have created a real-life hub in the Spanish coastal city of Marbella — reporters around the world are digging into gender-based violence, sexism, and discrimination.

They are tracing the legal loopholes and cultural norms that allow such harm to persist, and reveal how gendered power dynamics play out in these different lived realities.

For International Women’s Day this year, GIJN spoke to the reporters behind these three investigations, to find out how they ran their projects, what they uncovered, and where relevant, their tips for working on stories of this nature, particularly how they prioritise source safety to ensure that exposing injustice does not replicate it.

It is worth adding that even as women report on these stories, they too, are facing abuse, particularly online. A Council of Europe report released earlier this month noted how "women journalists have been disproportionately targeted by abuse as they face a double risk, being attacked on account of their work and due to their gender." The report cited a 2025 Stand up for Journalism survey that found that up to 87 per cent of women journalists have experienced online violence related to their work, and that "women journalists are routinely exposed to gender-based violence, including threats of rape, misogynistic abuse, stigmatisation, stalking, and death threats."

Technology is also playing a role in the kind of online attacks that reporters, and other women, are facing.

Polina Bachlakova, technology reporter for the Fuller Project, has been tracking the global rise of surveillance technologies, noting that women and gender-diverse activists at the forefront of protest movements are often targets. Bachlakova’s report on gender-based digital transnational repression showed how easy and relatively cheap it is for governments and individuals to procure spyware that can hack a woman’s phone and computer to surveil, intimidate, and harass.

"Laws, regulations and protections that are supposed to protect women from being repressed transnationally and get some sort of justice exist on paper, but they are absolutely not accessible," said Bachlakova.

Investigating violence against women and professional footballers

It was a chain of personal contacts that linked investigative reporter Gabriela Keller to the first source. The woman she was introduced to said she had been subjected to extreme violence by her former partner, a top-level footballer. According to her account, he continued to stalk her even after their breakup.

"She had this very pressing sense of injustice, but nobody was interested in what she had to say," said Keller, a senior reporter who was at the time working for the Berlin-based investigative newsroom CORRECTIV. "Not the police, not the court, and not the management of the football club."

In many ways, going to the media was her only chance to be heard. "Women abused by famous, wealthy men have little incentive to speak. They have nothing to gain — practically nothing — and a lot of risks," she told GIJN.

But as Keller and her colleagues started to dig into the case — and others that they came across during the course of this project — they came across a roadblock: non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) limiting what many women who had alleged violence and intimidation from partners and former partners were able to say, and a fear of facing repercussions for speaking out. "My ex can ruin my life," one woman told them.

The NDAs posed a challenge: How could they expose what they believed to be a wider context of abuse if they could not name the women or the football players accused of being implicated?

As well as the testimonies of intimate partner violence, the reporting team wanted to explore how the NDAs were creating a wall of silence.

The team decided to start with the story of a woman whom they could name — a Polish model and influencer who had claimed that she had been abused by a top-level footballer when she was with him. She died by suicide days after allegedly signing a confidentiality agreement obliging her to "immediately" and "irretrievably" delete all evidence of her having been in a relationship with him: photos, messages, emails. (The player in question always rejected accusations of violence leveled against him).

Eventually, reporters for CORRECTIV and Süddeutsche Zeitung would speak to nine women who said they were abused by their former partners, who were all football players. The investigation, Abuse of Power in Professional Football, uncovered what Keller describes as "scary" patterns and parallels of not just violence but surveillance, intimidation, and isolation.

The reporting uncovered allegations ranging from the physical assault experienced by one victim to the emotional: one of the women said she had been locked inside a bathroom, another reported discovering a listening device had been installed in her bedroom.

But as well as the testimonies of intimate partner violence, the reporting team wanted to explore how the NDAs were creating a wall of silence: they found that the agreements were often introduced when the relationship started to deteriorate. In Germany, NDAs in private life are largely unenforceable, but this does not lessen their intended psychological effect. "The NDA creates deep-rooted insecurity," said Keller.

The intimidation continued through lawyers, football club managers, and publicists, all with the goal of protecting the reputation of the football stars and discrediting their ex-partners. As one of the accused men allegedly told his ex-girlfriend, "Who do you think will believe you?"

While the series prompted one legislator to call for a review of NDA limits, it has led to little formal change in football governance or legislation. One of the footballers named in the piece was ordered by the courts to pay a fine for assaulting his girlfriend, and was also dropped by FC Bayern after fans protested his proposed return. Just before a Champions League match kick-off, protesters unfurled a banner reading: "Against abuse of power and physical and psychological violence in relationships."

The story started from the account of one woman who was not believed, but by the end of the project, there were signs that people were refusing to look away. For Keller, the impact can also be felt in how the series exposed the deliberate, well-funded systems that shield powerful men and silence women.

Reporting on victims of intimate partner violence

Reporting on intimate partner violence involving high-profile individuals requires more than standard investigative rigour. For Keller, covering these cases demands both methodological precision and heightened empathy to avoid doing harm.

Survivors set the pace: "You have to tiptoe your way through the process," Keller pointed out. Pushing for details or speed risks becoming another source of pressure in lives already shaped by control.

Be transparent about the process: Keller explains to her sources from the outset that she will need documents, messages, photos, and witnesses, and that she must contact the accused for a comment, which will be published. "It’s not about not believing them. It’s that I have to be able to defend the story."

Balance editorial independence: "As a younger journalist, I was told you can't let anyone interfere with your story," but she noted: "It's not your story. She [the source] is the one who has to live with the consequences when it is published." She sends the women she has spoken to the quotes and reads the story over the phone to balance sensitivity without surrendering editorial independence.

On New Year’s Eve 2021 in Brazil, at least seven women were killed in incidents classified as femicide. For journalist Laís Martins, the events of that night were not a statistical anomaly but a breaking point.

“Femicide cases had become overwhelmingly common. Every day there was news of new cases, and I remember this day in particular was striking," Martins recalled.

At the same time, another shift was underway. Then-President Jair Bolsonaro, was loosening gun laws, expanding civilian access to firearms, and driving a surge in sales and imports for high-caliber weapons.

Martins had already been covering the legal changes and the booming gun market. The question that drove her project, Wounded, was whether easier access to firearms was reshaping the country’s most intimate crimes. Were more women dying because more guns were in circulation?

Her reporting efforts exposed systemic weaknesses: data was not standardised, and many femicides were misclassified as homicides, obscuring gender motives.

Martins stepped into the technical world of firearms, reading specialist literature, and cultivating expert sources to understand calibers, triggers, and the kinetic energy of firearms. Some femicide cases were linked to knife killing, but Martins wanted to understand how high-caliber weapons were linked to higher fatalities.

She even visited a shooting range to better understand what she describes as an "extremely masculine and intimidating" universe. But the heart of the investigation lay in the data.

"It involved some ruthless FOIA'ing," said Martins of filing freedom-of-information requests with public security departments across Brazil’s states, seeking figures on gun ownership, femicide, and the weapons used.

Her reporting efforts exposed systemic weaknesses: data was not standardised, and many femicides were misclassified as homicides, obscuring gender motives. Martins searched for patterns to fill in the gaps. Her investigation found that firearms that had previously been restricted were increasingly appearing in femicide cases. She also examined racial disparities, finding that Black women were disproportionately affected by gun violence.

Martins quoted some of the children of the women killed in her story, using prosecution documents rather than interviewing them. "I wouldn’t interview them even if I had the chance. I believe that losing their mother or relative and, in some cases, witnessing such a crime, is already traumatising enough."

The reporting faced institutional barriers, but it contributed to a broader body of evidence linking liberalised gun laws to rising gender-based violence. Current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has moved to tighten firearm regulations, and Martins believes such investigations helped shape public understanding of the connections between gun ownership and femicide. The impact was also personal: Women wrote to Martins to say the reporting gave them the courage to persuade their partners into re-thinking their ownership of firearms, with some giving up their guns.

The Manosphere: From Online Subculture to Real-World Network

UN Women defines the "manosphere" as the online communities that have "increasingly promoted narrow and aggressive definitions of what it means to be a man — and the false narrative that feminism and gender equality have come at the cost of men’s rights."

Governments and advocacy groups have increasingly scrutinised their links to online misogyny and real-world violence, while many have pointed out the dangers of networks that denigrate and demonise women.

An investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Sun, Cigars, and Sexism: How Spain’s Marbella Became a Hotspot for 'Manosphere' Influencers, found that this ecosystem is not confined to the internet. Influential figures with large audiences and commercial ventures were repeatedly converging on the Spanish coastal city of Marbella, raising questions: Why there? What was taking shape? and Why should we care?

"We're not interested in private beliefs. When influential online movements develop real-world infrastructure — events, businesses, networks — that moves it firmly into the public-interest realm," said freelance investigative reporter Mayya Chernobylskaya who worked on the story. 

OCCRP zeroed in, defining one particular part of the manosphere through trackable indicators such as misogynistic rhetoric, business, and ideological links. They then built a database of figures converging in Marbella and then filtered it down by cross-checking the names against business records, social media, long-form content, and on-the-record statements.

Members of the reporting team immersed themselves in the podcasts, livestreams, and lifestyle courses created by the influencers flagged as being part of the Marbella manosphere network. That information, in turn, provided insight into the connections between these individuals and their self-positioning. The online content and offline dimensions pointed to about 20 people meeting the manosphere criteria and Marbella connection, indicating an online subculture functioning as a real-world network.

Readers said mapping shared locations and networks of these manosphere influencers made the phenomenon feel real and more disturbing.

"That gave us confidence that this wasn’t anecdotal — it pointed to a real cluster worth reporting," said Chernobylskaya. From there, it was a follow-the-people investigation consisting of mapping the networks and anchoring rhetoric to documented legal cases and real-world ties.

The investigation found influencers such as Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan (who have denied allegations of human trafficking and rape in the UK, and forming an organised crime group in Romania) hobnobbed with other influencers such as Stirling Cooper, a retired porn star who is allegedly recruiting young boys in Australia into the neo-Nazi movement, and Conor McGregor, an Irish MMA fighter who has been found liable for sexual assault in Ireland.

OCCRP published the story together with partners in Belgium and Spain. Readers said mapping shared locations and networks of these manosphere influencers made the phenomenon feel real and more disturbing. What seemed like online chatter was shown to be embedded in identifiable, physical spaces.

According to Chernobylskaya, establishing a clear definition of manosphere and tying it to documentable traits was a crucial first step in the investigation. "You have to stay very evidence-driven. On polarising topics, credibility depends on precision: prove what you can, and don’t overreach," she said.

This article was first published by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and has been republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We sourced a new lead image with permission from the sources and lightly edited the article for house style

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