«Mine was a sick love: I was jealous and I said that he beat me.” It is the debut with which a 40-year-old woman, a social health worker, has retracted in Court the accusations against her ex-partner, accused of abuse in the family. Now she is the one who risks ending up under accusation: la pm Chiara Canepa requested the transmission of the documents to the Public Prosecutor’s Office slander, self-slander and false testimony.
The twist came after one had been heard in the courtroom 20 year old Ukrainian (arrived in Italy shortly after the start of the war). The young woman said that on 25 September 2023, while she was reaching a friend in the Lingotto district, she met the couple on the street, she was crying and he was pushing her: «The lady asked me to call the police. I followed them, I thought she needed help, but the man pushed me away.” That evening the accused (defended bylawyer Vittorio Rossi) is arrested for violating the prohibition on approach ordered by the investigating judge following complaints from his partner.
Call to retrace the 4 years of living together – full of violence, according to the statements made to investigators during the investigations -, the 40-year-old changed her story: «When we argued we pushed each other». To then recontextualize a photograph (evidence in the documents) in which she had «two black eyes»: «It was the fault of an old road accident, I used those photos to accuse him. But it wasn’t him.” Not only that, also regarding the episode described by the young Ukrainian witness, the lady claimed that she was crying and wanted 112 to be called because she had been mugged and they had taken away her bag with her cell phone inside: «I didn’t want it to be him to phone the police because there was a restraining order and they would have arrested him.”
During the testimony, the alleged victim fell into contradiction and the judge Immacolata Iadeluca he warned her several times of the consequences: “You swore to tell the truth, tell it.” Not at all intimidated, she insisted – annoyed and angry – that she had always lied: when she explained to the investigators that “she was tired of her 9-year-old son witnessing scenes of violence” and also when she reported that the child also confided to the carabinieri who, if they had known what “his mother was going through”, “would have aged 10 years”. In the end the magistrate, after having made several objections to the woman by comparing the current declarations with the previous ones, interrupted the examination and asked the Court to transmit the documents to the Prosecutor’s Office to evaluate the crimes of perjury, slander and self-slander against 40-year-olds.
