First forced to drink a bottle of vodka, then the blackout. “I didn’t have the strength to react. I was paralyzed, I wanted to scream but I couldn’t move.” And after that night, acts of self-harm and suicide attempts. It was a lengthy deposition, dramatic and marked by emotional breakdowns, a story that lasted almost six hours with questions from the prosecutor Gregorio Capasso and his lawyer Giulia Bongiorno, that of the main accuser of the four Genoese friends, Ciro Grillo (son of Beppe, founder of M5s), Edoardo Capitta, Vittorio Lauria and Francesco Corsiglia, on trial in Tempio Pausania for group sexual violence. In the closed hearing, the Italian-Norwegian student, for the first time in court to tell her truth about herself, appeared “devastated”, as her lawyer described her. So much so that almost immediately her deposition was interrupted: tears and sobs as she remembered that evening of 16 July 2019 among the bars and the Billionaire nightclub in Porto Cervo: “I had drunk a lot”, she says. The night is long, and ends in the Grillo family’s villa with the four friends met at the Billionaire: this is where the gang violence allegedly took place. Before her, the then 19-year-old would have been forced to drink a bottle of vodka which would have made her “inanimate, inert”, with her arms immobile even though she wanted to wave them: a blackout which would have left her at the mercy of the defendants, who they would take turns raping her. A nightmare night that left its mark on her: “I attempted suicide several times – she confesses – I ran on the tracks, towards the train. And then many episodes of self-harm”.
Even today he struggles to recover: “I suffer from eating disorders”, he explains. The lawyer Bongiorno, who represents the student as the injured party and the civil party, also came out of the hearing feeling exhausted: “I believe that for a lawyer these days are the most difficult, the most complicated and the most painful. Why see a person who spoke of suicide, of acts of self-harm, of running towards the tracks to be put under the train is not easy. Sometimes these things are trivialized but instead they are of an unprecedented gravity, it is not that they leave their mark but they destroy, they devastate And in fact we are talking about a destroyed, devastated girl who gave a deposition while sobbing.” You will return to the courtroom tomorrow morning at 10: it will be the defense team’s turn to question the key witness. “Already today – underlines the lawyer Antonella Cuccureddu – many contradictions have emerged compared to what her friend (second alleged victim, ed.) and the other witnesses heard so far have said. These are crucial elements – she clarifies – given objective technical data that emerge from wiretaps and hard disks, and which made it possible to make an almost millimetric reconstruction of the evening”. The lawyers of the defendants are ready to fight, leveraging above all on some videos shot with smartphones in the villa in Porto Cervo and which would film some phases of the sexual relationship between the girl and the defendants. In the meantime, two more hearings have been scheduled: after those already scheduled for 13 and 14 December, when the student’s examination will continue, it will go to 31 January and 1 February 2024.
breaking latest news © Copyright ANSA