It had already happened the week before: the two friends had held out their hands during a car ride. It all seemed to end there, with some somewhat forced excuses, but instead seven days later it had moved on. Upon returning from the party in a club in Bellinzago, arriving in a car park not far from the house of one of them, the friends had stopped the car. And this time there were four of them. Then the blackmail: “You have to have sex with us, or we won’t take you home from here anymore.” She, in a panic and fearful of threats, had suffered. And she had had sexual relations with each of the four peers who were just over 18, all residing in Novara.
More than eleven years after the violence reported by a young girl who was a minor at the time, and in the midst of a complex judicial process consisting of an evidentiary incident and four trials with opposite outcomes (including an annulment in the Supreme Court), the Court of Appeal of Turin sentenced the four boys with whom she had had relations in October 2013, two to 4 years and 2 months in prison, the other two to 4 years. At first instance in Novara they had been acquitted, then a battle was triggered with appeals and counter-appeals. And it’s not over yet. The defendants have always said they were innocent, and explained how it had been an outing between acquaintances, in which a relationship had taken place but with everyone’s consent.
The victim, however, had spoken of a group sexual assault upon returning from an evening of entertainment. At the trial she, now twenty-eight, reiterated that on the evening of the rape she had been subjected to a threatened request: «You have to have sex with us, or we won’t take you home. You’re leaving on foot”, her friends had ordered after stopping the car in an isolated car park. Panicked, she had to agree. Then for months she hadn’t said anything to anyone, and in fact she had still gone out with the molesters on a couple of occasions. In the end she confided in her boyfriend at the time, who saw her as detached and asked her for explanations, and then in her parents.
