The trial of Ciro Grillo, Beppe’s son, and his three friends – Edoardo Capitta, Francesco Corsiglia and Vittorio Lauria – begins today, Wednesday 1 June. They are all accused of group sexual assault against a 19-year-old student. The boys have always defended themselves by saying that the reports were “consenting” but for the Prosecutor’s Office, which will be represented in the courtroom directly by the prosecutor Gregorio Capasso, there would have been violence.
The four young people, who will not be in the courtroom, were sent to trial last November. “Today I am finally starting to breathe again”, Giulia Bongiorno, the girl who reported the rape, said through her lawyer, after learning of the indictment of the four young men. “My client ended up in the dock,” Senator Bongiorno denounced before leaving the court.
There are seven judicial police officers who will take the witness stand: they serve between Milan and Genoa, where the victim and the four accused respectively reside. Among these is the lieutenant of the Carabinieri in service to the Milan Duomo company who in the summer of 2019 carried out the search and seizures of Ciro Grillo, the Carabinieri marshal who serves the operational unit of Genoa San Martino which has carried out the searches and kidnappings of Edoardo Capitta. And again, the marshal who carried out the search of Francesco Corsiglia’s home.
But what are the charges against the four defendants? “Forced to have sex in the bedroom and in the bathroom cubicle”, “grabbed by the head drinking half a bottle of vodka” and “forced into group sex” by the four young men under investigation who “took advantage of her conditions of psychological and physical inferiority “of that moment. These are just some of the accusations of the Public Prosecutor of Tempio Pausania (Sassari) against the four boys of Genova bene. Pages upon pages of horrors told by the young Italian-Norwegian student, just 19 years old, whom she allegedly suffered on that July 17th three years ago.
As stated in the papers of the Prosecutor “the residence was identified thanks to a selfie taken” by the young girl and “is attributable to Beppe Grillo”. The investigations were closed twice, a first time in November and a second time in early May, after the new interrogations of the young people. And in recent months Ciro Grillo has been listened to again but not by the Prosecutor, as had happened the first two times, but by the Carabinieri of Genoa, delegated by the magistrate.
According to the magistrates it was not “consenting sex”, as the defense of the suspects says instead. For the charge it was “group sexual assault”. And to prove it they have attached to the documents, the raw story of the young woman that she explains that she was raped in turn. “At about six in the morning – reads a report – while RM (the victim’s friend ed) was asleep”, the magistrates write, the young woman was “forced” to have sexual intercourse in the bedroom and in the shower cubicle of the bathroom, with one of the boys. “The other three suspects attended without participating.” Then another violence, forcing the young woman to drink half a bottle of vodka against her will. The Prosecutor also has a series of photographs and images that he has included in the file. “The girl then lost consciousness until 15 when she returned to Palau”, the prosecutors write. The “lucidity” of the victim “was enormously compromised” when she was “taken to the marriage room where the suspects” would have forced her to have “five or six” sexual relations.
Ciro Grillo, Edoardo Capitta, Francesco Corsiglia and Vittorio Lauria, who deny all allegations of sexual violence, were on vacation in the Costa Smeralda in mid-July 2019, between dancing evenings at the Billionaire and dinners with friends. But one night, on July 16, as the 19-year-old girl later recounted, they would be responsible for gang rape. At their expense there are also some photographs that the consultants of the Prosecutor have found on cell phones and some wiretapping. The girl, who is defended by the lawyer Giulia Bongiorno, former Northern League minister in the first Conte government, has been several times by the investigators and has told, down to the smallest detail, what would have happened that night. In over a year and a half of investigations, the magistrates also checked the phones not only of the children but also of other people, including that of Parvin Tadjik, mother of Ciro Grillo and wife of the Genoese comedian. The woman, heard by the prosecutors, has always said that that evening she slept in the apartment next to the one in which the violence would take place, saying that she did not notice anything.
According to what was reconstructed by the investigators, thanks to the story of the victim but also of some witnesses, that night in mid-July 2019, Ciro Grillo and his three friends had spent the evening at the Billionaire. Then, almost at dawn, they left the place with two young Milanese students. The girls followed the four young men to Beppe Grillo’s villa on the Costa Smeralda. Except that there are different versions of what happened here. On the one hand, the girl, who said she was raped after her friend fell asleep. The very young girl said she was forced into sexual intercourse with one of the boys. And then she too was raped by the other three. For “five or six times”. But the version provided by the young offspring of Genova bene is completely different. They said that the group relationship with the young woman had taken place but that she was “consenting”.
And to strengthen their thesis, they told the magistrates who questioned them several times that after the first report, she and the first boyfriend would go together to buy cigarettes, and on their return, in the villa del Pevero, in Porto Cervo, she he would have consenting relations with the other three. And that in the following days there would be exchanges of messages with the boys. The complaint took place only later, when the girl had returned home to Milan, when she told what happened during a visit to the Mangiagalli clinic. A version that totally contrasts with what the girl said, an Italian-Norwegian student on vacation with her friend. The trial will begin on Wednesday. But the four defendants will not listen to the depositions of the seven judicial police officers.
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