Castelvetrano: Former mayor warns Reporter Morici

The former mayor accused Morici of delegitimizing him and warned that he will ask the journalist for damages. Morici comments that his newspaper has never censored him.

On March 12^th 2019, Felice Errante, former mayor of Castelvetrano (Trapani), sent, through his lawyer, a warning to journalist Egidio Morici, collaborator of the web site Tp24 and administrator of the blog Castelvetrano 500 firme (Castelvetrano 500 signatures). Felice Errante accuses the journalist of conducting a press campaign against him to delegitimize him.

Hence Felice Errante “warns him of full compensation for the damages suffered to his own image and honour through his journalism activity”. The amount is not quantified, there is no reference to a specific article, but to several articles subsequently shared also on the journalist’s Facebook page. The former mayor argues that with these articles, Morici has “in the time attempted to convey the message that he would be a bad administrator, besides the most infamous accusation that can be directed at a Sicilian public administrator, that is, not having known how to maintain a safe distance from the Mafia ”.

THE JOURNALIST’S COMMENT – “It is interesting that the warning concerns only me and not the editor of the publication. It is a very clear message, of the type “we have esteem for the newspaper, but not for this journalist who does not do his job well”. The discredit is always spread broadly by seeking the complicity of publishers and editors,” said Morici to Ossigeno.

What more than the others, that could have probably been annoying Errante, was  an article published on March 7^th  2019 in which Egidio Morici reported the text of some wiretaps of the conversations of a former city councillor, Lillo Giambalvo. He was arrested for Mafia association but then acquitted of the charge on appeal. The wiretaps concerned his relations with Mayor Errante. In the article, Morici reports that Errante warned Giambalvo to join the city council replacing another councillor. The Errante administration was in office from 2012 to 2017, when the town council was dissolved due to Mafia infiltration.

“If I still write – says Egidio Morici – I owe it to my newspaper, which has never censored me”.

Ossigeno had already taken up the case of Egidio Morici in 2016, when a Sicilian regional councillor had insulted him on Facebook, calling him “information bandit”.

RDM (wt)