Defamation: Chief Editor and a journalist from Il Fatto Quotidiano are acquitted

The investigating magistrate found that Vincenzo Iurillo and Marco Travaglio exercised the right to criticize the municipal councillor Carmine Attanasio

On December 18th 2018, the Court of Naples acquitted the journalists Marco Travaglio and Vincenzo Iurillo, chief editor and editor, respectively, of Il Fatto Quotidiano, of charges of defamation against Naples municipal councillor Carmine Attanasio. The judge had already asked for it to be set aside but Attanasio had opposed it.

The councillor had sued them for two articles published in 2015: one, signed by Iurillo who had defined him as an “unpresentable” candidate in the regional elections of Campania because of his turncoat or his series of moves from one party to another; the other article, signed by Travaglio, in response to a protest by Attanasio himself. The politician in fact chained himself in front of the Rai headquarters in Naples to protest against the newspaper and in particular against Iurillo and Travaglio, displaying placards on which he defined the two journalists as “scribes of organised crime”.

The judge for the preliminary investigations recognized that both Iurillo and Travaglio observed the limits of the right to criticize and that the news was of public interest.

RDM (wt)