EXCLUSIVE: Shortly after news broke Thursday morning that journalist Evan Gershkovich has been freed in a 24-person swap across multiple countries, Gershkovich’s employer, Wall Street Journal, published a detailed account of the complex and difficult behind-the-scenes efforts that led to the diplomatic breakthrough.
The story, Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich by Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski and Aruna Viswanatha, reads like a spy thriller and sparked immediate interest from top Hollywood players. CAA, which signed the WSJ earlier this year and is representing the paper’s reporting on the story for development, has been fielding calls over the past 24 hours in what is shaping up to be a bidding war for a screen adaptation of the investigative piece as a movie or a limited series.
Gershkovich was arrested in April 2023 and later sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The WSJ feature involves a number of political figures, including the leaders of the U.S., Germany and Russia; government officials; the tragic Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, whose shot at freedom was at one point tied to Gershkovich’s; and Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who starred in the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny; with cameo appearances by a cadre of big names from Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carlson to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
But at its heart, it is the story of a mother, Ella Milman, who would not give up on her mission to bring her son home.
“To me, this is about the essence of who we are as a country,” President Joe Biden said after the deal was announced. “It really is about personal relationships. It’s about family. It’s about having access to people you love. And you endure.”