 Jamal Khashoggi, prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist, has gone missing after visiting his country's consulate in Istanbul. We knew that they would try to sweep the whole thing under direct. The global response, the U.S. response, U.N. response, is bad boy. We're going to let you get away with this one. In October of 2018, the world learned of the brutal murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi had been a government insider in his home country of Saudi Arabia, but his relationship with the ruling family, and particularly Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, soured as Khashoggi became an influential advocate for free speech and human rights within the kingdom. In September 2017, fearing retaliation, he fled to the United States. In 2018, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to obtain marriage papers, and was ambushed by a team of government operatives allegedly deployed by Prince Mohammed. As Khashoggi's fiance, Hatija Shengiz, waited outside for him to return, the Saudi team went to work. His ability to speak freely, to fight for freedom of speech, freedom of press, some sort of parliamentary democracy in his country was so important to him that he was willing to leave and lose everything in order to do that. And in so doing, he finds himself in the crosshairs of Mohammed bin Salman, and this ultimately leads to his murder, and not just any murder, but a brutal, gruesome murder inside his own country's consulate, while his fiance is waiting outside believing that he's coming out with marriage papers. Brian Fogel is the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind the 2017 Netflix documentary Icarus. His new film, The Dissident, out now on VOD, contains shocking audio tapes, transcripts, and video surveillance footage of the Saudi operation that ended with Jamal Khashoggi being strangled to death and his body disposed of in several trash bags. The documentary features damning revelations, such as the Saudi team's efforts to cover up the murder after the fact by dressing a Khashoggi body double in the slain man's clothes and parading him in front of security cameras. I don't believe that Saudi Arabia believed they were going to get caught. I think the murder was botched. They didn't know that there was a listening device in the consulate. They had actually come to sweep the consulate for bugs two days before they murdered Khashoggi and didn't find the bug that was in the media room. Clearly, they were trying to plant the murder on Turkey with the body double. They were not expecting the fiance to be waiting for him outside with his phones, with his devices. They would have confiscated those devices and those devices also revealed Pegasus on his phone. Using Pegasus, a spyware tool that the Saudis allegedly installed to eavesdrop on Khashoggi's conversations, they discovered that he was communicating with a young dissident living in Canada named Omar Abdul Aziz. As the film recounts, Prince Muhammad also attempted to go after Abdul Aziz. We see in the film that before killing and murdering Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia sent a rendition team to Omar Abdul Aziz in Canada, and he's smart enough to have recorded these conversations in which they basically are going, Omar, come back to Saudi Arabia, we'll make you famous, you'll be a big celebrity, MBS likes you, he likes that you're dissenting against him, he thinks you're great, really? The dissident also exposes widespread efforts to cover up or gloss over Khashoggi's killing. You in the film see Agnes Kalamard go in front of the UN Human Rights Committee, lays out this crime that the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies in the world have validated, and the United Nations does nothing. Gutierrez doesn't take it to the Security Council, doesn't go to the General Assembly, there's no trial in the Hague and the Netherlands, I mean, right? This is just, okay, they're too big, they're too powerful, they have too much money, and we've got too many allies in the region and they're too central in that part of the world in the region, we're just going to let this one go. The King firmly denies any knowledge of it, it's going to have been rogue, he killers, who knows? Remember an early Trump thing is, you know, he had ties to terrorism, that he was working with ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood and was friends with Bin Laden and basically going, oh, okay, it's okay to have that happen. Now, of course, none of that's true. He wasn't working with Muslim Brotherhood, he wasn't working with ISIS, yes, he knew Bin Laden, he knew Bin Laden in the 1980s when the United States was supporting Bin Laden, when we thought he was our ally. He wasn't a radical, he wasn't a terrorist sympathizer. Basically what the Prince needs to do is just unplug, unplug government support to radicalism and radicalism will die. The radicals in Saudi Arabia, most of them are within the government service, the government payroll. All of a sudden there was a justification for why somebody should be murdered in such a manner, and that should not alter the narrative and that's, you know, one of the main reasons, you know, why I also wanted to make the film. Though he was fresh off an Oscar win for Echorus, Fogle says it proved difficult to find partners willing to make the dissident, and it was only made possible through the backing of the Human Rights Foundation. Though the documentary premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews, it was rejected by all major distributors before being picked up by Briar Cliff Entertainment. The dissident was ultimately turned down by a few studios because they feared reprisal. Can you just talk about the challenges that you faced in distributing the film? So we couldn't have asked for anything better from the audience response and the critical reception, but we basically walked out of Sundance without a single offer to acquire the film. It was a universal pass from all of the major streamers, all of the major studios, and what was going on behind the scenes there is that every single one of these major streamers, major media companies that are now global companies made the decision. Those issues are not as important as subscriber growth, as being able to take investment from the kingdom, as protecting your investment and business interests in the region, and not upsetting their allies such as the Emirates and Egypt and India and everywhere else where Saudi Arabia is highly invested, and ultimately when you look at the Saudi investment, I mean soft bank is the world's largest hedge fund. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund is the world's largest fund for investment. And so their tentacles are so deep. And I understand it. I'm not mad at them. I understand the predicament. I just wish that we as a society were valuing human rights and valuing stories like this. We see now with especially China's box office being massively opened. A lot of productions are dependent on Chinese rules and they don't want to offend officials. So do you think that there's a line beyond which that you can identify that is immoral for companies or individuals to engage with these authoritarian regimes or is it sort of muddy always? These are the calculated decisions that businesses and leaders make when figuring out whether or not you're going to actually try to seek justice, accountability, or punish a murder. And what we see here in this case, the stakes are too high. $450 billion worth of things ordered from a very rich country, Saudi Arabia. If I say we're going to cut it off, they will get the equipment, military equipment and other things from Russia and China. The alternative is to what? Lose hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons sales globally to not have that those hundreds of billions of dollars of liquidity for investment into outside companies, tech companies, banks, et cetera. This change has to be able to take place and come just like the Arab Spring did from individuals, just like the BLM movement, just like me, too. Just like all of these social justice campaigns, they have to come from the people because they're not going to come from the businesses and it's not going to come from the government. We know that many are trying to use this painful thing. All our mega projects are ongoing. Our war on extremism is ongoing. Our war on terrorism is ongoing. Developing and upgrading the country is ongoing. No matter what they do to lower our speed or hinder our speed, they will not succeed. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia. We saw the Trump administration sweep this under the rug in a pretty disgusting way, but Obama sold arms to Saudi. It's been the same way for the past several presidents. Bush, like we've had very close ties to Saudi Arabia for all the reasons that you just mentioned, given how horrific this crime was and how much publicity it got, is there anything that could happen in geopolitics that could change that status quo? And do you have any reason to believe that the Biden administration will be any different? Donald Trump was recorded for Bob Woodard's book bragging. I saved MBS's ass. I mean, this was intentional. But what I did see in going with Ateja to Washington and having your meet with everybody from Nancy Pelosi to Lindsey Graham, I saw a real desire among both houses, bipartisan, that we must re-examine our relationship with the Saudis and there needs to be some sort of justice for Jamal. There needs to be accountability for Jamal. And Biden has come out publicly. Second year anniversary of Khashoggi's murder. Biden made a public statement that if he was elected president, that he would, you know, look to re-exam the US-Saudi relationship, seek accountability for Jamal's murder. So he has publicly stated that. And I guess we'll we'll see how it goes as he takes office. This so-called Davos of the desert. The forum that was designed to attract international investment. The new Europe is the Middle East. The public investment fund reaching two trillion or more by 2030 outside the political realm. Is there any long term blowback from this that you're seeing in like the business community or anything? Because MBS had this big vision 2030. There was the Davos in the desert where, you know, he was inviting all this foreign investment. A lot of that dried up. We start to see companies back off about Jamal Khashoggi. UN says an MP4 video file sent from a WhatsApp account used by the Crown Prince infected Bezos's phone. He sends a virus to Jeff Bezos's phone, which is how all those texts were released. So, you know, on net now, has that actually impacted the Saudis long term? And do you think he regrets this or at least regrets that it got out? The funny thing is before the Khashoggi murder, they had done such a good job with that PR campaign, with MBS's trip to the United States in March of that year, where he met with, you know, literally everybody from Obama to Bush, to Bezos, to Elon Musk, to Larry Ellison, to Bill Gates. I mean, it was, you know, and and he was in a suit and he's young and he was painted as the great reformer. And they bought it. We bought it. Everybody, everybody was like, wow, this guy is really got an open mind. He's going to change things. And what we saw in the Khashoggi murder, his arrest, a Lujan al-Hatul woman's activists, he arrests and crackdown of thousands and thousands of people dissented who had any opinion of dissent. The purge at the Ritz Carlton, among, you know, other members of his family and anybody who held wealth in that country, we saw basically the contradictory actions of a totalitarian regime that what was being painted to the outside world and being supported through, you know, a massively funded PR campaign was the exact opposite of what was really going on in the kingdom. And that's what put Jamal in MBS's way because Jamal was out there going, OK, this is great that you want to do all these things and all of this is positive for our country. But you can't do that and also lock up people and behead them and and put them on trial and torture their families and etc, etc. If they don't agree with you, that's not that's not evolving. That's, you know, that's the dark ages. And Jamal spoke up about that and that is, you know, one of one, if not the key reason why they murdered him. That is what I'm fearful of. He it is becoming a one man rule. He has a control of everything. He is creating an environment of of of of intimidation and fear. Saudis are being silenced. Things are not being transparent. And that is not a good recipe for reform in Saudi Arabia. Fogel says he's most passionate about seeking justice and accountability for whistleblowers, dissidents and other victims of totalitarian governments around the world. Were you the mastermind that cheated the Olympics? Yes. The film for which he won an Oscar in 2017, Icarus, provided crucial evidence on the Russian Olympics doping scandal based on revelations from the former head of Moscow's internationally certified drug testing laboratory, Grigory Rochenkov, who worked with Kremlin officials to implement the scheme. Was Putin aware of the existence of the Russian doping system? Yes. My boy, in the case of Icarus, you know, me and my team ended up literally protecting the life of a whistleblower, bringing him to the United States, bringing his story to the New York Times, then following that story, shepherding him into protection to this day, have continued to try to protect him. Putin will kill me. Holy shit. Two people connected with the Russian doping program are already dead. The fallout of Icarus was five months after the film came out. Russia was banned from the 2018 Olympics. And the IOC, the Olympic Committee, cited Icarus and their recent recent decision. So all these factors, you know, just made me feel as, you know, a documentarian, a storyteller that I wanted to continue on, you know, journeys like that, making stories like that, knowing that the content really had global importance of human rights, a story of not only a horrific murder, but in Omar Abdul Aziz, his family and friends and brothers are jailed without charges, beheadings, 900 beheadings last year, most from young activists. And, you know, the list goes on and on. And you mentioned Omar Abdul Aziz. That's one of the other particularly wrenching moments that I found from the film was when he got a call from his brother begging him to stop because the Saudi government was torturing his brothers or that he said he had 22 of his friends and his brothers have remained in solitary confinement in Jeddah. Icarus also featured, you know, astounding tales of this whistleblower who gave up everything to tell his story. So what insight has that given you into what kind of a person does that and how is how is that worth it for him to have everybody that's ever known in his life be tortured and in prison in order to reveal this? I felt deeply connected to Hatija and the loss that this woman was going for. And I wanted to and still want to help her and roll up my sleeves and help her fight for justice for Jamal because it shouldn't just be her. And I became deeply connected and found, you know, a brother and Omar Abdul Aziz and his journey. And I saw his truth was so important that he was willing to do and is willing to do anything for that. And the fact that his brothers would be tortured and sit in a prison for two years without charges, simply because they know him and simply because he is speaking truth to power. That's why I made the movie. I made the movie to try to make an impact in the world and to fight for justice for Jamal so that his voice wasn't silent.