The sentence pronounced by the judges of the Court of Appeal of Milan who considered the twenty seconds taken by a woman to react to sexual violence to be too many will cause discussion. With this motivation, the officials also acquitted Raffaele Meola, a former CISL trade unionist, in the second degree, confirming the sentence pronounced by the court of Busto Arsizio (Varese) in 2022. The facts date back to March 2018 when the man on duty at Malpensa was accused of sexual assault by a hostess, who had turned to him for an industrial dispute.
The reactions
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 she had not been given proof in the hearing regarding what the hostess had reported. (TO
