Conviction of Grillo jr and friends, the victim is fully trustworthy

The alleged victim of the group rape for which Ciro Grillo, Beppe's son, and three of his Genoese friends were convicted, must be considered fully reliable. For the events - which took place on the night between 16 and 17 July 2019 - on 22 September last, the Tempio Pausania panel - president Marco Contu, alongside Marcella Pinna and Alessandro Cossuha - affirmed the responsibility of Grillo jr, Edoardo Capitta and Vittorio Lauria, setting the sentences at eight years, at six years and six months instead Francesco Corsiglia. A sentence that enhanced the credibility of the Italian-Norwegian student, whose statements 'were significantly corroborated. There can be no doubt,' wrote the judges in their 72-page motivation, 'that the assumption of the "beverone", which also contained a quantity of vodka, caused a condition of physical and mental inferiority in her that facilitated the criminal actions of the defendants.

For the panel the consent of the alleged victim was excluded for acts consumed in a context of duress and inability to react: "there is no doubt that the defendants knowingly violated the sexual freedom of the girl by their actions, taking advantage of her disabled condition, and therefore well aware of the state of drunkenness of the victim, who had been forced by the defendants to take alcoholic substances during the evening and was therefore in a state of psychophysical alteration and lack of lucidity".

For the Tempio Pausania judges, Ciro Grillo and his friends Edoardo Capitta and Vittorio Lauria, were a "brutal" group, cohesive from the start, that "acted in a predatory and prevaricatory context, taking no account whatsoever of the girl's fragile state. As for Francesco Corsiglia, he did not participate in the group violence but was nevertheless foundguilty of a first sexual assault against the girl, who had spent an evening with them at the Billionaire.

The explanatory statement also outlines the perimeter of the sexual violence regulation. "The violence required by Article 609-bis of the criminal code does not necessarily have to be of an absolute nature, such as to totally annul the victim's will, but can also produce only a coercion effect when the offended person has allowed himself to be in a particular situation such as to negatively affect his mental process of free determination, since such consent is not free consent but forced consent'. In the judges' opinion, the victim was reliable, as were the consistent testimonies supporting her story, from those of three friends, to the confession made to the kitesurfing teacher, from her mother's and sister's account of the alleged victim's state of prostration, to the results of the visit to the Mangiagalli clinic in Milan, which had highlighted the bruises on her body, up to the testimony of her friend Roberta, a fictitious name, 'guest' with her in the flat of the Pevero resort, close to that of the Grillo family.

What Roberta suffered, for the judges, can also be qualified as sexual violence. Grillo and the others took photos of themselves with their genitals on her face, while she slept on the sofa. "The victim of this episode then gradually became aware of the situation, defining what she had suffered as an expression of an act of domination by the defendants, aimed at humiliating her as a woman". The judges cleared the field of the attempt to 'derubricate' what had happened to a simple game, because it was 'played' with someone who was not in a position to join or participate.