Independent women journalists critical of the Serbian government face sexual insults, threats of lawsuits, surveillance, smear campaigns and online rage.
In 2019, Jovana Gligorijević wrote a damning profile of a Serbian influencer who had connections to political power players and alleged criminal networks.
Gligorijević works at Vreme, an independent news magazine founded in 1990 by intellectuals and activists fighting state censorship. Aside from her political reportage, she’s covered stories on sexual violence and, specifically, how Serbia’s judiciary treats rape victims. She notes wryly that in her experience, “when you report on politics and human rights, sooner or later you come across the far right as the root cause of the problem.”
Her 2019 story devolved into an ongoing ordeal of harassment and intimidation. The subject of her profile enlisted two far-right Serbian activists who went on YouTube to livestream themselves lambasting Gligorijević, during which, she says, they were “suggesting various things that they would like to do to me and how … they offered to throw me out of a window.” They followed this up with crass commentary on X, ridiculing her public admission that she had suffered from depression and labeling her “suicidal.”
Gligorijević eventually filed a civil complaint against the influencer and his two supporters, but six years on, nothing has come of it. Instead, her complaint spawned death threats from another man who in 2020 received a one-year suspended sentence and a two-year restraining order from the Serbian courts on her behalf.
Independent journalism, as opposed to government-backed media, has been risky for decades amid war and nation-building in Serbia. But the government is now cracking down harder on journalists who report what they observe at the marches and rallies that have taken place since a disaster at a train station occurred in the country’s second-largest city in November 2024.
Near-daily protests broke out across the country when the concrete canopy of the train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16 people. Demonstrators suspect corruption, cost-cutting and failed oversight. Built in 1964, the station was more recently being spruced up with funding from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and had been ceremoniously opened several times, particularly around elections. Protesters claim the investigation into the canopy accident has been sloppy at best.
For women reporters—who are estimated to make up slightly more than half of the profession—the repressive climate today goes beyond physical scrapes at protests. It extends to relentless mental terror: sexual insults, threats of lawsuits, surveillance, smear campaigns and online rage and trolling.
And, as Gligorijević has seen, the courts are slow to help when women do go after their attackers. Incidents are reduced to misdemeanor charges, while pro-regime tabloids regularly fabricate stories about journalists. She is quick to add that colleagues of hers have experienced worse treatment, to the extent that they have been forced to temporarily leave the country. Death threats, she says, are the norm. She and others have been frozen out of government press briefings and barred from entering government offices, prompting them to rely on other sources.
According to data analysis on the state of journalism in Serbia, in cooperation with the SafeJournalists Network and information from the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office, 57 percent of the threats and physical attacks in 2024 were against women journalists; those threats were often more aggressive and contained explicit threats of sexual violence. Since this summer, such attacks have increased. Reporters Without Borders counted 34 assaults in July and August alone, the most recorded in any year in the country since 2020.
Still, “today it’s less likely you’ll be punched in the street as a female reporter,” says Ana Hegediš Lalić, who heads Serbia’s Independent Journalists Association of Vojvodina. “You are beaten daily with words, insults, fabricated scandals and smear campaigns in pro-government media.”
She continues, “Sexism has always been there, but now it’s wrapped in a ‘patriotic’ narrative—if you’re a woman and you criticize the government, you’re immediately labeled a ‘foreign mercenary,’ a ‘traitor’ or a ‘hysterical journalist who just needs sex.’ My inbox and social media are full of such messages. Over the past few years, I’ve received hundreds of death threats and, of course, rape threats.”
Aside from the physical or mental risks, journalists working in Serbia’s independent media are also facing professional, personal and sometimes financial risk, as independent news outlets are burdened to fight government lawsuits, including strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP), which can prevent a newspaper or magazine from functioning.
“SLAPP lawsuits are a sophisticated form of pressure,” Lalić says. “Instead of being beaten, you’re hit with a 10,000 euro [roughly $11,500] lawsuit and years in court.”
She adds, “Dozens of small, independent outlets in Serbia are on the brink of collapse or have already shut down because they can’t survive the financial and legal exhaustion, precisely the goal of the SLAPP suits.”
While she personally has not been sued, her organization has. These suits have grown in popularity: In 2023, Serbia had some of the highest numbers of SLAPP lawsuits filed among European countries.
Government funding, meanwhile, buttresses media organizations that amplify the party line. This warfare of financial sustainability is the greatest threat to Serbia’s independent media, according to Snežana Milošević. An economics journalist who serves as secretary general of the Association of Local and Independent Media-Local Press, Milošević speaks of a “complete collapse of media pluralism,” noting, “If the current financial mechanism to allocate public funds for informing citizens continues into next year, there will be even fewer independent local media outlets, and their role will be entirely marginalized.”
Katarina Stevanović, a reporter with Vreme, was briefly detained on Sept. 5, 2025, while covering a protest in Novi Sad.
“If you ask me why the protests provoked the government so much, I’d say they see that their positions are not as safe as they were before,” she says. “Independent opinion polls show that his [President Aleksandar Vučić’s] popularity has declined. It [has been] a year since the canopy collapse, yet we still don’t know who was responsible.”
This article originally appears in the Winter 2026 print issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
