Reacting to the death of an infant who was part of migrants whose boat was shipwreck near the Italian coast, in 2020 Roberto Saviano called Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, current president of the Council of Ministers and vice-president, “bastards”. advice.
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Italian journalist and writer Roberto Saviano was fined 1,000 euros on Thursday October 12 for having defamed the current president of the far-right Italian Council Giorgia Meloni. He insulted her in 2020 because of her anti-migrant positions.
The lawyer of the author of the international bestseller on the Neapolitan mafia Gomorra immediately announced its intention to appeal, even if the Rome court judging this case was satisfied with a symbolic sentence, while the prosecution had requested a fine of 10,000 euros. Giorgia Meloni’s lawyers, for their part, requested damages in the amount of 75,000 euros, estimating that Roberto Saviano had “used excessive, vulgar and aggressive language”.
“You are bastards!”
During a television program in December 2020, Roberto Saviano was questioned about the death in a shipwreck of a six-month-old baby coming from Guinea. The writer, visibly upset, then pointed the finger at Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, the head of the Anti-Immigration League, today vice-president of the Council: “I just want to say to Meloni, and to Salvini: ‘You are bastards! How could you?’
Giorgia Meloni declared in 2019 that the ships of humanitarian NGOs which rescue migrants “should be sunk”, while migrants saved by NGOs represent only 5% of the total arriving in Italy. Matteo Salvini, then Minister of the Interior, blocked the arrival of these ships in Italy the same year. The latter is a civil party to the trial.