2017: U.S. Journalist Abby Martin Fled Venezuela after Death Threats from Anti-Government Rioters

Abby Martin is an American journalist, television presenter, and activist. In 2015 she launched The Empire Files as an investigative documentary and interview series funded by Telesur and produced in the United States. The Empire Files aired on Telesur throughout Latin America and on Free Speech TV and the Real News Network in the United States. The Empire Files released over 100 documentaries, interviews (including Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Dennis Banks, Rafael Correa), and on-the-ground reports from battlefields in Palestine, Afghanistan and Syria. Martin described the Telesur relationship as:” The show is totally independent of Telesur. We merely sell them the content; they have zero control over anything we do.” [1]

In May 2017 Martin and co-producer Mike Prysner travelled to Venezuela and filmed a short documentary about the protests against the government that had been going on since early April. Telesur aired the show in July: Empire Files: Abby Martin Meets the Venezuelan Opposition which highlighted opposition violence. Martin and Prysner began their film by interviewing numerous peaceful protesters who arrived early in the day, but then they began following the violent protesters who tended to arrive later on.[2] Martin described what happened after they were identified: [3]

·       “We didn’t know how bad it was until after we were there on the ground reporting, because once the photos came out that we were there and started circulating and tying us back to Telesur, then things got really, really bad. A completely fake propaganda campaign, we basically became the center of a fake news viral campaign started and fomented by major opposition leaders, and the media, major academics there, that were propagating a theory that Mike and I were actually spies infiltrating the protest to collect intelligence for the GNB, the Venezuelan intelligence services, based on absolutely nothing. Not only was this fake news perpetrated around about us but it incited hundreds of death threats, actual lynch threats. I’ve never been subjected to actual lynch threats before, and it was just all the same thing. ’Lynch them. Burn them. Throw Molotov cocktails on them,’ saying like ’burn them alive. ‘If we were still there, we would have a target on our back.”



1.Norton, Ben, Venezuelan opposition Spreads Lies about U.S. Journalists, Inciting Violence, Death Threats, Alternet, June 3, 2017.

2. Emersberger, J. and J.Podur, Extraordinary Threat, Monthly Review Press, 2021.

3. The Real News, Abby Martin: World Ignores Opposition Violence at Venezuela Protests, Venezuelanalysis, June 12, 2017.

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