The well-known anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano, author of the famous Gomorrah and with an escort for years due to threats from the Neapolitan Camorra, was sentenced this Thursday by a Court in Rome to pay 1,000 euros for having defamed, calling the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The figure, however, is much lower than the 75,000 that the president's lawyer and the 10,000 from the prosecutor's office had requested. According to Meloni's lawyer, Luca Libra, “bastard is not a criticism but always an insult, even in the dictionary it is always a derogatory term.”
“Losing today is an example of what will happen tomorrow, it leads even more to understand the situation we live in, with an executive branch that constantly tries to intimidate anyone who answers its lies. Today I am proud to have faced this trial,” lamented the writer, who has always considered this process a trial on freedom of expression regarding any criticism of the Government.
It all happened in December 2020 on the set of Piazzapulita, a broadcast on the La7 television channel. Then Saviano, shocked by the death of a Guinean baby in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, denounced the anti-immigration ideas of Meloni and Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, who, as now, were already opposed to the NGOs that operate in the canal. from Sicily. The baby had been rescued by the humanitarian ship Open Arms, but died before being able to receive medication. “You must have remembered all the garbage thrown against the NGOs, which they call taxis of the sea or cruise ships. All I can say is: bastards. To Meloni and (Matteo) Salvini, bastards, how can you? “He assured them, live.
Then Meloni was not prime minister, but was in the opposition as leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party that had obtained just 4% of the votes in the previous elections in 2018. But when the trial began, in November of last year , the Italian far-right leader had already won the last Italian general elections, with 26% of the votes, and had just been named prime minister of a coalition government with the League and Forza Italia. As president, she did not withdraw her defamation suit.
Salvini, who is now deputy prime minister and minister of Infrastructure and Transport, did not denounce him for this insult on television but did do so for calling him “minister of bad life” (a term associated in Italy with the mafia) when he was head of Inside. Saviano assured this after a rally, in 2018, in Rosarno, one of the places with the greatest presence of the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian criminal group, in which some members of local clans were identified. The trial, very similar to Meloni's, began in February and is still pending completion.
In January of this year another similar process also began against Saviano by another member of this Executive. In this case, after a complaint from the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, who asked him for 250,000 euros for having opined that he achieved this position by having been a servile journalist to the right. Before joining the Ministry, Sangiuliano was news director of RAI's second channel, public television, and did not hide his ideas favorable to right-wing parties. The writer also called him a “mediocre” journalist and “Putin’s biographer.” In this case, in May the Court of Rome agreed with the anti-mafia leader and exonerated him from paying the compensation claimed by the minister.
This 2023, Italy occupies 41st place in the world ranking of press freedom by Reporters Without Borders, which warns that in this country "information professionals sometimes give in to self-censorship", also "due to fear of possible legal actions such as defamation suits,” which are quite common against journalists. PEN International, the world association of writers, which defends freedom of expression, had already asked Meloni in an open letter to withdraw following suit. Now he warns that “the fact that this process was initiated by Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, represents a dangerous warning for writers and journalists, suggesting that her words could lead to long court battles and possible imprisonment.”
