On September 18, 2020, SPIEGEL published a first article about his research into the Lewandowski case.
The text was about how the striker and his former advisor Cezary Kucharski argue about who of the two is entitled to the millions of dollars in advertising with Lewandowski.
A little later it came out that Lewandowski had reported his former adviser for extortion.
Kucharski demanded several million euros from him so that he could calm down.
When mentioning the sum, the name of the SPIEGEL reporter Rafael Buschmann was also mentioned.
How did that happen?
In 2019, lawyers von Lewandowski and Kucharski had drafted an out-of-court settlement that should end the dispute over advertising revenue.
For this reason, Lewandowski and Kucharski met in September 2019 and January 2020 to negotiate a severance payment for Kucharski.
In these talks, Kucharski named the sum of 20 million euros in addition to other figures and said: "This amount was dropped in one of the talks by Rafael Buschmann."
Lewandowski secretly recorded these one-to-one conversations.
In his testimony to the public prosecutor, Lewandowski stated that he feared Kucharski, Barthel and Buschmann would work together.
Lewandowski cited a WhatsApp message to the public prosecutor on September 3, 2020, in which Buschmann had asked him to talk to the SPIEGEL research.
In his opinion, Buschmann wrote to him "not as a journalist" but as an accomplice of Kucharski.
His reason for this interpretation: Buschmann's message was worded in perfect Polish.
Lewandowski testified that there were no Polish special characters on German telephone keyboards and that he had therefore thought that the message was written by Kucharski or "someone close to him" and that Buschmann had only passed it on.
It is one of the principles of journalism to get in touch with all parties involved in good time before publication and to ask them for comments on the research.
The message to Lewandowski on September 3 was the second attempt by SPIEGEL after the first on August 30.
The news was translated into Polish by a permanent employee of the magazine who lives in Poland.
SPIEGEL emphasizes that neither Buschmann nor any of the employees who worked on the reporting in question were aware of Kucharski's alleged blackmailing by Lewandowski - let alone that they were involved in any form.
Maik Barthel and Cezary Kucharski also deny their former client's allegations.
Lewandowski left numerous questions from SPIEGEL about his hearing of witnesses unanswered.
After Kucharski's arrest at the end of October, the Springer media “Die Welt” and “Bild” published several articles in Germany that suggested that Buschmann played a role in the alleged blackmail.
Buschmann took legal action against these reports.
The Hamburg district court agreed with him and prohibited this form of reporting.
"Die Welt" and "Bild" were unable to provide any meaningful evidence for their representations and instead issued final declarations in which they fully and legally recognized the ban on publication.
They deleted the relevant passages in their online editions.
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