In Poland the death of a teenager is being discussed a great deal, which according to the ongoing investigation into the case would have occurred by suicide: the topic is in itself relevant and particularly felt in the country, but there is also a lot of talk about it because the boy in question was the son of a parliamentarian, Magdalena Filiks, a member of the main opposition party.
Filiks’ son was just under 16 years old and committed suicide just weeks after the government-controlled Polish state media made public a story that personally concerned him: that in 2020 he had been the victim of sexual abuse by of a man. Now a movement of opinion has arisen in the country according to which the dissemination of this news would have created the conditions that then led to the suicide of Filiks’ son: some opposition politicians have explicitly accused the state media and the government, an expression of the party radical right-wing Law and Justice (PiS), to have direct responsibilities in the affair.
The accusation is in particular of having used a private and very delicate fact as a political tool with the intention of putting Filiks’ party, the Civic Platform (PO), in the centre, in difficulty.
There are two state media involved: television Polish Televisionalso known by its abbreviation TVPe Radio Szczecin. At the end of December 2022, a journalist from the latter, Tomasz Duklanowski, had published first an article on the broadcaster’s website in which the story of the sexual violence against Filiks’ son was reconstructed: the boy was not explicitly mentioned and was described as “the son of an important opposition politician”, but some were indicated gender and age, making it possible to identify it almost immediately.
The perpetrator of the sexual abuse, sentenced in 2021 to over four years in prison, was indicated in the article with only the first name and the initial of the surname, “Krzysztof F.”: even in this case, however, it was easy to guess that he was a Krzysztof Falinski, a party colleague of Filiks herself, moreover clearly recognizable from the photo used as an illustration of the article in which only his eyes were covered.
In a case like this, it would not have been legally possible to disclose the boy’s identity since he was a minor, and probably the story had remained unknown for over two years for this very reason. Radio Szczecin in fact made possible the unambiguous attribution of that event, which was then also taken up by TVP: Both are two media outlets that had previously been criticized by the opposition for being used by the government as a propaganda tool.
Friday March 3 Filiks has communicated on their social profiles the death of their son, specifying however that it had occurred two weeks earlier, on February 17. In the meantime, between this date and Friday 3 March, he had stopped appearing publicly. He did not provide details on the causes of death, he only wrote when the funeral would be held and where, asking the “media” (indicated precisely in this way, in quotation marks) to “respect the privacy of my family and not come”.
The Polish media not controlled by the government immediately started talking about it as a suicide, and although the news was not confirmed by Filiks, the interventions of some of his party colleagues also hinted that it was the case.
The state media that had reported the news of the sexual abuse in recent days did not mention the death of Filiks’ son at all, but in fact they were accused of having caused the teenager’s death. The leader of Civic Platform, former Polish Prime Minister and former President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, ha written on Twitter: «We will hold Law and Justice to account for all evil, for all the human damage and tragedies it caused while it was in power. I promise”. Polish human rights activist Adam Bodnar said Filiks’ son “was killed by the Law and Justice media regime”.
The Civic Platform MP Artur Lacki, who was among the first to comment on the death of Filiks’ son, proposed that all the opposition boycott the state media: “Until you apologize, until these pseudo journalists, these creatures journalistic events will not suffer consequences, I, and I believe any other honest politician, will give up participating in your programmes”. Government spokesman Piotr Müller declined to comment on the matter.
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Where to ask for help
If you are in an emergency situation, call 112. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call the Helpline at 02 2327 2327 or via the internet from hereevery day from 10 to 24.
You can also call the association Samaritans to the number 06 77208977every day from 13 to 22.
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