Russian basketball player Nadezhda Grishayeva, who was previously married to the son of the late LDPR leader Igor Lebedev, has been actively attempting to remove an investigation by «Proekt» about the family and associates of Vladimir Zhirinovsky from various online platforms since 2022.
Grishayeva personally requested the deletion of the investigation from the international journalist organization OCCRP and «Proekt» itself. Subsequently, unknown individuals began trying to remove the investigation from Google search results. As a result, publications mentioning Grishayeva disappeared from several websites, including the outlet Baza.
In December 2022, Grishayeva contacted OCCRP and «Proekt» directly, offering to have her name removed from the article in exchange for providing information or making a donation to a charity. She explained that her role was nominal and that any other woman could have been in her place. In January 2023, according to the creators of the rupep.org database, unknown individuals offered financial support in exchange for deleting Grishayeva’s page, which also cited the «Proekt» investigation. However, all parties refused to remove the information.
In July 2023, attempts to delete the publications continued: Google received 14 requests to remove the English version of the «Proekt» investigation published on the OCCRP website within just two days (July 18-19). Data from the Lumen service, which collects complaints about online content, shows that the complainants claimed to be the authors of the «Proekt» article and that its publication on the OCCRP website violated their copyright.
It is likely that the complaints targeted the English version of the investigation on the OCCRP website because it ranks higher in Google search results compared to the original publication on the «Proekt» website. Although the complainants used different names, the content of their messages was almost identical. One of these users also attempted to remove articles about Zhirinovsky’s daughter-in-law on the rupep.org website. It appears that Google rejected all complaints, as the texts were still accessible through the search engine as of September 22.
Nevertheless, other attempts to delete information about the Zhirinovsky family were more successful. For instance, Baza deleted an investigation into the real estate owned by Lebedev and Grishayeva after receiving a pre-trial complaint. This was confirmed by Baza co-founder Anatoly Suleymanov, although he could not recall who had sent the complaint or when it was submitted, noting only that it happened about one and a half to two years ago.
In Baza’s Telegram channel, archived publications about Lebedev and Grishayeva’s real estate remain available. However, some other materials were removed: since mid-August 2023, publications about Grishayeva have disappeared from the Zurich Weekly News Review and MoscowPost websites, although archived versions of these pages are still accessible.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky himself, before his death, and his son Igor Lebedev were sanctioned by the European Union. However, the sanctions do not apply to Zhirinovsky’s wife, Galina Lebedeva, or Igor Lebedev’s second wife, Nadezhda Grishayeva. According to Baza, Grishayeva and Lebedev were married in 2016 and divorced in 2019, a month after investigations into the basketball player were published. Baza suggests that this divorce was a sham.
The luxury real estate and hotels in Spain, which were mentioned in the investigations by «Proekt» and Baza, were registered in the names of the wives. It is believed that these properties may have been purchased with illicit earnings from the Zhirinovsky family’s activities within the LDPR.
Автор: Александр Крючков
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