POLITICO
A Milan court has ruled that journalist Giulia Cortese must pay Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni €5,000 for mocking her height on social media.
The Italian freelance journalist was convicted for posting two “defamatory tweets” that “body shamed” the prime minister.
“You don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni. After all, you’re only 1.2 meters (4 feet) tall. I can’t even see you,” Cortese wrote on X. In another post, she called the prime minister “a little woman.”
Various websites list Meloni’s height as between 1.5 and 1.6 meters.
Cortese’s post about the PM’s stature — and the subsequent fine — follows an ongoing dispute between the journalist and the Italian leader.
In October 2021, Meloni said she would pursue legal action against Cortese for posting an edited image depicting the Italian PM in front of a framed photograph of late fascist leader Benito Mussolini.
“I believed this falsified photo is of unique gravity,” Meloni wrote on Facebook. “I have already instructed my lawyer to take legal action against this despicable hoax. Is this what some left-wing journalism has come to?!”
While the judge in that case deemed the Mussolini post did not constitute a crime, the court found in Meloni’s favor regarding the comments on height.
“It has been a very stressful period which lasted three years,” Cortese told POLITICO, saying that she has been subject to insults — some of which are explicitly sexist — and threats against herself and her young daughter from Meloni’s supporters.
Cortese said she offered to publish a letter of apology, but Meloni turned this down.
The Cortese case is not the first time Meloni has lawyered up against a journalist. In October last year, a Rome court fined anti-mafia reporter Roberto Saviano €1,000 after he insulted Meloni’s attitude toward migrants on a television show. Prior to the ruling, several media monitoring groups penned an open letter calling for Saviano’s case to be dropped.
Press associations have warned that government interference and lawsuits against journalists have grown since Meloni came to power in October 2022. This year, Italy dropped five slots — to 46th place — in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
Cortese accused Meloni of trying to silence critical journalistic voices, “a bit like [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán, who by her own admission inspires her,” she said.
“The Meloni method is to create a sort of proscription list that includes all journalists and commentators who are unfavorable to her and who can, in some way, ‘harm’ her.”
The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, said in June it is monitoring “negative trends” in Italy’s media landscape, though the official report has since been delayed.
“With this government, freedom of expression in Italy, which was already very low compared to other countries, has dropped even more,” said Cortese.
Meloni’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.