The southern Italian region of Apulia has to pay a million euros in damages to a woman who was switched as a baby in hospital. Half goes to her family. The family’s lawyers had demanded 10 million euros.
More than thirty years later, finally satisfaction for Antonella Z. and her family. A court in the southern Italian region of Apulia has ruled that she will receive half a million euros in damages for ‘a life she was never able to live’; the other 500,000 euros goes to her biological parents and brother. The now 33-year-old woman was switched in hospital with another girl, Lorena, shortly after her birth.
Antonella and Lorena were born twenty minutes apart on June 22, 1989, in the hospital of Canosa in Apulia, the heel of the Italian boot. The two were accidentally mixed up by hospital staff and given to the wrong parents.
Neglected and mistreated
What follows is a hard life for both women. Lorena has had a difficult relationship with the people she sees as her parents for years and has hardly any contact with them. Antonella, the woman who is now receiving compensation after years of fighting, was neglected and abused by her ‘parents’ and eventually ended up in an orphanage.
Antonella’s biological mother, Caterina, accidentally saw a photo of the young woman on Facebook in 2012, and she is struck by how much she resembles her own family. Without initially thinking that it is her daughter, she starts to have doubts, also because of the difficult relationship with her own daughter. She contacts Antonella and they decide to have a DNA test. This shows that the two match for 99.99 percent: Antonella is Caterina’s daughter. That discovery is the start of a long legal battle, which after almost ten years leads to compensation of one million euros. “That money doesn’t change what happened,” Antonella told a reporter for the Italian newspaper La Republica. “I’m not going to get my past back with it.”
Lorena, the other woman who ended up with the wrong parents, has also filed a civil case, demanding 5 million euros from the regional government. That case is still ongoing.
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