“You raped me. I am complaining about you.”
“Last night at the party? But we talked after making love. You seemed happy to me.”
“I was drunk”.
“Me too”.
“You took advantage of me.”
“But if you mumbled ‘Come on!'”
“precise”.
“‘Aao’ means ‘come on, go ahead'”
“Not at all. It means ‘come on, stop, stop'”.
In 1976 I attended the last year of high school in Madison, Connecticut (USA) thanks to the Interculture/AFS exchanges. “You raped me, I’ll sue you”, classmate attractive Cheryl threatened me. Yet I was convinced that the Rolling Stones were clear in their song “Come On”: It was an explicit invitation. “And I don’t mean probably”, said Mick Jagger, “I don’t mean probably”. My initial knowledge of English was based on rock songs, and in the end, though, I’m forgiven. But for a few days it was a nightmare. Which is why I would never want to be a judge who has to decide on some very complicated allegations of sexual violence. In which two unrequited versions of the most intimate intimacy are revealed to each other without any witnesses. My word against yours.
This is demonstrated by the unreal trial that has been going on for four years for the gang rape in Tempio Pausanias (Sassari), in which Ciro Grillo, the son of Beppe, is accused. I follow it carefully, it’s even more complicated than an Agatha Christie mystery. The last hearing will be on Monday, the next on 22 September. By now we have got used to it, we find it normal that in Italy every time the courts adjourn not for tomorrow like in the movies, but for two-three months. The excuse is that “the parties and the panel of judges should have time to peruse the documents acquired”. Yet the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard lawsuit was settled in a month and a half. Instead, between recordings, videos, photos, chats, testimony and reports, the advisers filled Tempio’s magistrates with computer material measurable not in gigabytes, but in terabytes. Billions of bits, thousands of pages of transcripts. An army of lawyers, as there are four young defendants and each has nominated two. The parents of the accuser hired former minister Giulia Bongiorno, a senator from the Northern League. At each hearing they all arrive in Olbia by plane from Genoa, Rome, Milan, accompanied by their assistants and suitcases full of hard drives, and then drive to the center of Gallura among the cork oak forests.
A lot of deployment was done to find out if the girl was consenting enough to have sex or was too drunk that July 2019 night in Porto Cervo, after the billionaire. Thus, with footage from a surveillance camera of a tobacco seller in Abbiadori where the young woman went with her alleged rapists in a car to buy cigarettes the next morning. What was the expression on his face? Calm, Desperate, Angry? And then the witness kitesurf instructor in Porto Polo with whom she had an appointment for lessons the next day: “She was stunned, she told me she messed up, she needed to talk to me”. Talk TV offered money to invite him, Massimo Giletti’s Arena showed a free video of him in which the 45-year-old moans: “I too feel raped by this media siege”.
Sooner or later the three poor judges will have to sentence. Which would inevitably turn Siroe and his friends into monsters or martyrs, and the girl into a victim or cynic. Nothing in between. In the meantime, however, his parents – all of them – are united in the hundreds of thousands of euros being spent in legal costs. Then appeal, then trial. And is it any wonder that Grillo Jr.’s accuser allowed eight days to pass before denouncing him, and Leonardo Apache La Russa’s accuser 40 days?
If I had been raped, I would have gone to the police station within two hours immediately after the hospital report. But it’s understandable that it takes days for girls to fully understand, or that families think a thousand times before embarking on an expensive, multi-year ordeal. Perhaps Siro and Apache’s misfortune was that they had to cohabit with the daughters of rich people. Because there, after every disco, every Italian night, how many girls are raped or forced to have sex by their father’s sons, but without parents who have such broad shoulders and pockets so Big enough to buy a lawyer on Bongiorno’s level?
We provincials, who at the age of 17 had to move from Udine to America to find love, did not take this risk. We can only thank the bottles of Verduzzo made for us to drink by our wonderful Friulian companions in the tavern or branch. He has opened various doors of seventh heaven for us. A friend of mine scientifically calculated that reaching for two or three glasses was necessary to overcome the reluctance, but never go beyond the fourth because sleep took over. It was our border, the insurmountable border between debauchery and drug addiction that saved innocence: having sex with a girl without her knowledge was unthinkable. On the other hand, apart from any judicial considerations on the lack of free consent, what perverse taste could there be in owning an inert body? And anyone who talked about “vis greta puele” was considered a barino, troglo. Loser, first of all, because he could not ‘win’ her with reassuring kisses and caresses. Of course, we were all quite worried, the next morning someone pretended not to remember exactly that she had gone too far. Some compensated for this by getting engaged. Years after we got married and separated, I started paying lawyers and clogging up the courts.