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The federal court of appeal of the Italian Winter Sports Federation (FISI) he confirmed the six-month suspension sentence against a Nordic ski coach in Veneto who ran a chat where he himself and several athletes, including some minors, exchanged pornographic, child pornography and racist material. The second degree judgment was requested by the federal prosecutor who had requested a higher sentence against the president of the FISI Veneto regional committee, Roberto Visentin, and his deputy Federica Monti, who were acquitted in the first degree. The appeal sentence instead sentenced them to three months’ suspension for not immediately reporting the incident.
The investigation was opened last year following a letter sent to the federation by a parent of a minor athlete. In a short time the federal prosecutor was able to reconstruct that the chat – called “Francesco Totti” even though the former Roma captain is completely unrelated to the matter – had been created by the coach to keep 12 athletes updated on training times and meet up ahead of the races. In addition to this information, the coach and the athletes exchanged images and videos with pornographic and child pornography content and images of underage athletes: they were photos sent by the athletes themselves to their boyfriends who then shared them in the chat without their consent. In cases like this, the alleged crime is the “illicit dissemination of sexually explicit images or videos”, more commonly known as revenge porn. Materials with references to fascism and Nazism, as well as various racist contents, were also disseminated and commented on in the chat.
The federal prosecutor’s office investigated 15 people including the coach, who is also an army non-commissioned officer stationed in Verona as a paratrooper student, 10 twenty-year-old athletes, two minors and the two federation managers. In March, in the first degree sports trial, the federal prosecutor Stefania Crippa had asked for a suspension of six months to a year for all the people involved, but the judges had acquitted the eight athletes who had not shared pornographic or racist content, and convicted the remaining four received light punishments such as a warning or suspension for a month. The two managers, Visentin and Monti, were acquitted.
Only the coach was sentenced to a six-month suspension, confirmed on appeal: “his role as an instructor, as a teacher, aggravates his conduct”, they wrote the judges in the sentence, as “he had to manage the chat and inhibit the boys from publishing and spreading offensive, inappropriate, indecorous photos, comments”. In addition to the sports prosecutor’s office, the Verona prosecutor’s office and the military prosecutor’s office are also dealing with the case.