“In this report, I’m driving around with an actor, not an informant,” one of the co-authors of the Superwizjer investigative report admitted in court, acknowledging that viewers had been misled. The journalists have been sued by Lubin Mayor Robert Raczyński.
Proceedings are underway before the Regional Court in Legnica in a lawsuit filed by Lubin Mayor Robert Raczyński against TVN, the publisher of Onet.pl, and the authors of the TVN investigative report Dirty Game.
During the latest hearing, the court questioned two co-authors of the report, which aired in February 2024 on the Superwizjer program.
The hearing focused on how alleged intelligence informants were portrayed. In the report, the narrator states that the journalists meet an informant outside the headquarters of Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW), after which the individual gets into a car driven by Jakub Stachowiak.
The truth, however, turned out to be different. In court, the journalist admitted:
“In this report, I’m driving around with an actor, not an informant.”
He testified that the statements attributed to the alleged informant were actually read by a narrator, whose voice had been electronically altered.
“The scripts were prepared by the report’s authors. Stachowiak testified that he did not personally verify that part of the report because it was not his responsibility,” the local news outlet Lubin.pl reported.
The report’s authors convinced viewers they were watching a genuine meeting with either an intelligence officer or an informant whose face and voice had been concealed for security reasons. In reality, an actor appeared on screen while the dialogue was read by a narrator. As a result, the production created the impression of an authentic conversation, even though viewers were watching a staged reenactment. Moreover, the actors were not identified in the end credits.
“Using reenactments in investigative reporting is not, in itself, improper. However, they should be clearly identified in a way that leaves viewers with no doubt as to whether they are watching the actual source or an actor portraying that person,” Lubin.pl noted.
There are also serious doubts regarding the credibility of the transcripts used in the publications.
“In February 2026, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Legnica announced that the transcripts had been falsified and did not represent authentic conversations between Robert Raczyński and Andrzej Pudełko. Investigators also determined that the documents did not originate from any proceedings conducted by the security services. According to an expert opinion, the dialogues were created by one person or a group of people,” Lubin.pl recalled.
Raczyński is seeking court-ordered public statements from the defendants as well as payments of PLN 500,000 each to charitable causes. The court will decide whether the way the informants were portrayed, along with the remaining content of the report, violated the personal rights of Robert Raczyński and the City of Lubin.