DThe writer and anti-mafia fighter Roberto Saviano was sentenced on Thursday evening by a court in Rome to pay a fine of one thousand euros for the offense of defamation. The public prosecutor had demanded a fine of 10,000 euros, and the lawyer for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had appeared as a co-plaintiff, demanded 75,000 euros in damages.
Saviano had said at the start of the negotiations that there was “no greater honor for a writer than to bring trouble to such a mendacious political power” as the current government. The public prosecutor and the lawyer for the co-plaintiff countered that the targeted personal insult should not be confused with justified criticism of public officials. The judgment in the first instance is not yet final and does not result in an entry in the criminal record. The court acknowledged that Saviano had acted out of “motives of particular moral value” and therefore only imposed a fine. Saviano’s lawyer announced that he would still appeal the verdict.
Saviano: “This is just the beginning”
Saviano said after the verdict: “It is a symbolic punishment, but this is just the beginning. My defeat today is a sign of what will come tomorrow and makes us understand the situation in which we live: under a government that continues to intimidate those who expose its lies.” He is considering moving abroad after the guilty verdict, added Saviano, who is threatened with death by the mafia for his investigative work on organized crime and has had to be protected by the police around the clock for years.
Giorgia Meloni, chairwoman of the right-wing conservative Brothers of Italy party and head of government since October 2022, had sued Saviano because of his tirade on the talk show “Piazza Pulita” on the private television station La 7 in December 2020. In the program, the Naples-born writer Meloni and the Former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini was sharply criticized by the right-wing national League for their stance on the migration issue and repeatedly described the two politicians as “bastards”. The background at the time was reports of the death of the six-month-old boy Yussuf Ali Kanneh, who died while crossing with his mother in a smuggler’s boat from Libya to Lampedusa. Although the mother and her son were taken on board by the private rescue ship “Open Arms”, any help came too late for the toddler. Saviano expressed his anger on the television show that Meloni and Salvini used to describe private sea rescuers as accomplices of the smuggling gangs.
Statements not covered by freedom of expression
In November 2021, an examining judge allowed the main hearing to begin in the matter because the insult “bastard” was not covered by the right to freedom of expression and political criticism. In serious cases, the offense carries a prison sentence of between six months and three years; less serious cases are punished with a fine.
Before the trial began, Saviano complained that he had been “dragged to court by an authoritarian government because of criticism of it.” He accused the Prime Minister of “taking legal action against a writer as if she were on an equal level with him”. Saviano and his supporters said the aim of the process was to intimidate him and anyone else who “criticizes the work of this government.” However, at the time of Saviano’s insults and the complaint against him, Meloni and Salvini were not involved in the then left-wing government under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, with which Saviano openly sympathized, but rather they led the most important right-wing opposition parties. According to trial observers, it was the first time that a sitting head of government stuck to a complaint against a writer or journalist. Prime ministers usually withdraw their defamation charges when they reach the highest government office, it said.
At the beginning of May, Saviano won the case in the first instance against the non-party culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano. At the end of 2018, Saviano described the then news director of the public television station RAI 2 as a “stooge” of a Roman mafia clan, whereupon Sangiuliano also sued the writer for defamation. The current culture minister’s lawyers appealed against the acquittal. The judge justified his ruling by saying that Saviano’s statements, even if they could not be substantiated, were covered by the freedom of expression and freedom of the press guaranteed in the constitution.
#Italy #Roberto #Saviano #convicted #defamation