A court in Italy has ordered a journalist to pay 5,000 euros in damages to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for mocking her height over social media in what was defined as “body shaming”. According to The Guardian, the court also gave Giulia Cortese, a journalist based in Milan, a suspended fine of 1,200 euros over another post on X about Ms Meloni’s height. The post dated back to October 2021, a year before Ms Meloni’s far-right coalition government came to power.
“Italy’s government has a serious problem with freedom of expression and journalistic dissent,” Giulia Cortese said in reaction to the sentence, per the outlet.
The Italian PM launched a legal action against the journalist three years after the two women clashed on social media. The 36-year-old journalist published a mocked-up photo of Ms Meloni with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the background on X. in response, Ms Meloni wrote on Facebook that the “falsified photo” was a “unique gravity” and that she had instructed her lawyer to pursue legal action against the journalist.
Ms Cortese then responded with further tweets, including one that translates as “The media pillory you created on your Facebook page qualifies you for what you are: a little woman,” and “You don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni. After all, you’re only 1.2 metres (4 feet) tall. I can’t even see you.”
Ms Cortese was acquitted over the X post comparing Ms Meloni and Benito Mussolini. However, she was convicted of defamation over the latter two, which the court in Milan said amounted to “body shaming”.
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Reacting to the sentence, Ms Cortese said that being convicted over a “joke phrase” was “scandalous”. “There’s [a] climate of persecution. I don’t feel I have the freedom any more to write about this government because once you are identified as an inconvenient journalist for this government, they don’t let anything pass,” she told The Guardian.
“Going ahead with it risks costing me a lot, and I don’t know how it would end,” she added.
Ms Meloni’s lawyer, on the other hand, said that she would donate the 5,000 euros to charity when a definitive sentence was confirmed and the money was paid.
Meanwhile, according to The Guardian, this is not the first time that Ms Meloni has brought journalists and writers. Last year, a Rome court fined best-selling author Roberto Saviano 1,000 euros plus legal expenses after he insulted the Italian Prime Minister on television in 2021 over her headline stance on illegal immigration.
