My Friend Kim Wall

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The perils of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall’s work were numerous and varied. She pressed ahead, and would have wanted other women to do the same.Photograph by Tom Wall / TT News Agency via Reuters

The Swedish journalist Kim Wall was a rush of positive energy, a force so alive that it always felt good simply to be around her. And so, when she disappeared a little more than two weeks ago, while reporting a story about the Danish inventor and submarine owner Peter Madsen, and then later turned up dead, it seemed unbelievable that she could suddenly be gone. And, as the details have emerged of her disappearance—her possible killing at the hands of Madsen (who claims her death was an accident), the purposeful dismemberment of her corpse, and Madsen’s dumping of her body in the sea—the unjustness of her absence has been magnified.

Denmark was not one of the most dangerous places where Kim had worked, but the situation in which she was reporting was similarly precarious. She was researching a story idea that she would later pitch to magazines and, as a result, was working without any institutional backing. When she died, none of the editors she worked with knew exactly where she was, or what she was doing; she was at the mercy of her interview subject’s decency, and of her environment’s hospitality—a risk familiar to nearly every independent female reporter.

The first time I met Kim in person was last year, at the birthday party of a mutual friend: it was at a sleek hotel somewhere on the west side of Manhattan, and Kim arrived so late that I almost left without seeing her. But when she arrived, in a blur of affection and laughter, we sat next to each other and immediately began talking as if we had known each other for much longer—in some ways, we had, through the stories of the friends whom we shared—and, before the night was done, she had told me about her travels in Cuba, her impending reporting trip to Sri Lanka, and her life in China, and she had given me advice as we plotted about how best to handle romantic intrigues. She radiated boldness, the kind that you don’t see often in people out of their early twenties. (“Wait, she’s almost thirty?” I asked our friend.) Many of her friends remember her kindness, intelligence, and courage. She was warm and silly and wanted to know about the world. That inquisitiveness helped fuel her work.

The perils in her reporting were numerous and of different kinds: she ventured into North Korea, and covered the effects of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. She thoughtfully wrote about the Chinese in East Africa and a culture without Internet in Cuba. She interviewed self-proclaimed vampires, topless painted female performers in Times Square, and plus-size pole dancers. Throughout it all, she usually researched and reported with limited support and funding—the life of a freelancer. But, as a female journalist often working alone, she was more vulnerable, as women generally are, to violence. Kim worked on, anyway, and would have wanted other women to do the same.
