Georgia Fort cannot interview many of the most prominent community leaders in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. A huge swath of her Rolodex sits unused.
When federal agents arrested the independent journalist while she was covering a protest at a St. Paul church, press freedom advocates quickly condemned her detention as an affront to the First Amendment. But Fort says far less attention has been focused on how the ongoing legal case limits what she can say and to whom she can speak.
Put plainly, she’s being silenced, Fort said.
Fort is one of dozens of co-defendants arrested after the protest, at a church whose pastor reportedly worked as an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. Federal prosecutors charged Fort, along with independent journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon, with violating federal laws protecting places of worship from what they allege were illegal disruptions of a religious service.
But because many prominent Minnesota community leaders were arrested at the protest — including a school board member, a civil rights activist, a member of the clergy, the head of the state’s reparations movement and a state Senate candidate — Fort’s attorneys have advised that speaking with them might jeopardize her own case.
“These are sources,” Fort said in an interview last week while visiting Washington to speak at Howard University’s commencement. “Prohibiting me from talking to sources, talking to key community leaders limits my ability to do my job.”
Fort, who has won regional Emmy Awards for her work as a television journalist, runs the website BLCK Press and publishes stories to her personal website.
On Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, her video reports on topics like redistricting, voting rights and press freedom often draw hundreds of thousands of views.
When a prominent pastor in Georgia claimed in a news conference that a “fast” of Minneapolis-based shopping giant Target had ended, Fort sought to counter the narrative that a broader boycott was over. She has long-standing relationships with two of the boycott’s leaders, she said, but couldn’t talk to them: they’re co-defendants in her criminal case.
“I would’ve been doing sit-down interviews, a lot of original enterprise reporting around that to kind of balance what mainstream media was saying,” she said. “That’s a lot of the times what I’m doing as an independent journalist. But guess what? I can’t.” She still talked about the issue in videos online.
While Fort is new to being in national headlines, she’s not a newbie in journalism. Fort started her career at Minneapolis radio station KMOJ before moving into television reporting jobs in Columbus, Georgia and Duluth, Minnesota. She went independent in 2020, founding the website BLCK Press and in 2023 the nonprofit Center for Broadcast Journalism, which is focused on promoting representation in media. She also was named a 2025 fellow by the Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, which gave her $150,000 to pursue an executive leadership certificate at Harvard and expand the nonprofit’s training programs.
Fort sees her role as telling stories that mainstream outlets won’t, especially about issues affecting Black Minnesotans. “In my time working in mainstream media, there were a lot of story ideas that got turned down in traditional newsrooms that were really significant and important,” she said. “Because I have prioritized telling those stories unapologetically, it has allowed me to emerge as a competitor within my market.”
On her website, Fort says her reporting is supported by individual donations, proceeds from speaking engagements, merchandise sales and social media.
The case against Fort faced repeated setbacks. A federal magistrate judge initially declined to issue arrest warrants for Fort and Lemon, and a federal appeals court also rejected the charges. Federal prosecutors eventually secured an indictment from a grand jury, and Fort was arrested at her home in the early hours of Jan. 30 by federal agents for the Drug Enforcement Administration while her three daughters slept inside.
The indictment charges Fort with conspiracy against the right of religious freedom at a place of worship, and with injuring, intimidating and interfering with the exercise of religious freedom at a place of worship. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Ben Grazda, an advocacy manager for Reporters Without Borders North America, said that Fort’s arrest is an affront to freedom of speech and “right out of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s playbook.”
“Sending more than a dozen armed agents to a journalist’s home at night because the government doesn’t like their story is about as authoritarian as it gets,” Grazda said. “Georgia’s arrest is not just an egregious attack on a single journalist, but an unconstitutional attack on all Americans’ right to hear from journalists like Georgia.”
Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, agreed that the case against Fort continues to burden her and her journalism.
“Not only is making this a federal case overreach by the Justice Department,” he said, “the charges against Fort have a predictable chilling effect on her sources and therefore her very ability to work.”
Fort spoke at a graduation ceremony for Howard University’s communications students on May 8.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine who serves as the Knight chair in race and journalism at Howard, introduced the Minnesota journalist.
“In a time when we are seeing some of the most powerful journalistic organizations in the country capitulate and cower, Georgia Fort, an independent journalist without the protection of a corporate platform, refused to back down, refused to be intimidated, and determined to do the work of bearing witness even when it cost her,” Hannah-Jones said.
In her own remarks, Fort talked about a tension in contemporary journalism — between journalistic values of objectivity and neutrality, and practitioners of journalism who feel they cannot afford to be objective and neutral in the face of antidemocratic threats.
She also told students it may be up to their generation to answer these pressing questions: “What is journalism’s ethics on democracy? Is it the job of American journalists to be objective and tell both sides of the story, go interview the people who are dismantling our democracy, and then go interview the people who are trying to preserve it? Or is it our job as members of the Fourth Estate to defend democracy ourselves?”
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