Twenty seconds to react to sexual violence. Too many for the judges of the Court of Appeal of Milan who also acquitted at second instance, confirming the sentence pronounced by the court of Busto Arsizio (Varese) in 2022, the former CISL trade unionist Raffaele Meola serving at Malpensa at the time of the facts. Meola was accused of sexual assault against a hostess who had turned to him in March 2018 for an industrial dispute.
Rome, raped during the day on the terrace of the building in Prati: a 32-year-old arrested
The sentence
The Milan Court of Appeal rejected the appeal presented by the Public Prosecutor’s Office (the Public Prosecutor of Busto Martina Melita at the time had asked for two years) and by Maria Teresa Manente, head of the legal office of the Differenza Donna association to which the woman referred it was revolted. The second acquittal, as happened in the first instance, raised Manente’s indignation: «We will appeal to the Supreme Court – he assured – because this sentence takes us back 30 years and repudiates all the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court which for over ten years has affirmed that a sexual act, carried out in a sudden, subtle, sudden manner without ascertaining the woman’s consent is a crime of sexual violence and must be judged as such”. At first instance, the president of the panel Nicoletta Guerrero explained, after the acquittal verdict, that “the victim was believed” but that the evidence had not been reached in the hearing on what the hostess had reported.
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