PISTOIA. Ideological falsehood in a public act, revelation of official secrets and defamation in the press and on TV: these are the accusations for which the now former principal of the “Policarpo Petrocchi” art high school in Pistoia, the Prato area, was sent to trial Elisabetta Pastacaldi. Yesterday afternoon, the collegiate court’s acquittal sentence arrived for the now retired school director: because the fact does not exist for the first two crimes, because the fact does not constitute a crime for the third. Vice-principal Angela Borselli was also acquitted, in her role as secretary of the school’s Guarantee Body at the time: she was accused of only one of the two episodes of ideological falsehood contested.
At the end of his indictment, prosecutor Luigi Boccia had asked for a prison sentence of one year and two months for Pastacaldi and eight months for Borselli.
The facts alleged against the two accused are linked to the disciplinary sanctions that were imposed for what happened on 28 March 2019, after the Petrocchi school assembly at the former Breda “Cathedral” of Pistoia, where a high school student, then 15 years old, she was humiliated by some classmates after she got drunk. Disciplinary sanctions (suspensions with the obligation to attend socially useful activities within the school, then annulled after an appeal to the regional school office) inflicted on two students who did not take part in that episode (the protagonists of the alcoholic party, including the girl who had organized it, were suspended until the end of the school year and then failed).
«It was certainly the sentence we expected – comments the lawyer Carlotta Taiti, defender, together with her colleague Massimo Taiti, of Elisabetta Pastacaldi – In our opinion there were margins already from the preliminary hearing, in which we had asked not to proceed. We arrived at the trial, where the evidence was in reality purely documentary. A fair, tiring and painful acquittal for both defendants.”
«I believe that my client didn’t even deserve to be sent to trial. Justice has been done” adds the lawyer Paolo Frosini, defender of Angela Borselli.
An affair, the one that led to the trial that ended yesterday, which is part of a context of great media attention aroused by the outcry that arose around the alleged acts of bullying that occurred on the sidelines of the school assembly five years ago.
Together with their parents, the two students who were suspended, both represented by the lawyer Fabio Maria Galiani, were civil parties in the trial. It was the Roman lawyer, on 11 April 2019, who filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office against the principal and her deputy, in which he underlined that the two boys were not there in front of the “Cathedral” while other students, after the party based on alcohol, they tied up their drunk classmate with duct tape and painted the face: at that time, during the assembly break for recess, they were, as the receipts showed, buying a snack. But above all, in the complaint he explained how, the previous day, at the Petrocchi high school, he had not managed to obtain a copy of the suspension measures to be able to challenge them but that he had been told that it was not possible because the principal was not there and because the measures they had not yet been signed by the president of the school board.
From this last point, the first charge, in which Pastacaldi was accused of ideological falsehood committed by a public official in a public act.
The other accusation of falsehood concerned the sanction of “suspension from teaching activities with mandatory attendance” for carrying out socially useful activities within the school, applied to the two students on 4 April 2019. Which, in reality, according to the prosecutor’s office, it would only be inserted fifteen days later, through an amendment to the pdf document of the three-year training offer plan published on the website of the artistic high school.
The accusation of defamation against the former principal was related to the statements made in interviews both in newspapers and on television, in which, in practice, she defined the students implicated in the affair as not yet “Petrocchised” because they were in a first class, and therefore not still educated: «Those who attend this school don’t do certain things» he declared.
As regards the crime of revealing official secrets, the public prosecutor himself had instead considered that during the trial the certainty of the proof was not achieved: «The actual acts of the disciplinary measure were made known to the public opinion only after communication (at least orally) had been given to the people concerned”.
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