• Interview Roberto Saviano, after Rai has canceled its program: "Italy is a scary country"
  • Interview Roberto Saviano: "I am a martyr without death, an impostor, sometimes I regret not having died"

Renowned Italian anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano was sentenced Thursday by a Rome court to pay 1,000 euros ($1,054) for defaming current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whom he called a "bastard." The figure is well below the 75,000 that the president's lawyer had requested and the 10,000 of the prosecution.

Saviano's defense lawyer, Antonio Nobile, had asked for the acquittal "because the fact does not exist or does not constitute a crime" and announced that he will appeal this sentence.

"Losing today is an example of what will happen tomorrow, it leads even more to understanding the situation in which we live, with an executive branch that constantly tries to intimidate anyone who answers its lies. Today I am proud to have faced this trial," said writer Roberto Saviano after leaving the court.

During the last hearing of this process that began after Meloni's denunciation, before becoming prime minister, the writer said that this trial is born of "the words of criticism of those who have made fear and cynicism their policy."

Meloni's lawyer, Luca Libra, said that "bastard is not a criticism but always an insult, even in the dictionary it is always a derogatory term."

The trial began in November last year after the complaint of the far-right Meloni, who at that time had barely a month in the Italian Government.

The dispute between the intellectual and the politician began when the latter, in a television program on December 7, 2020, denounced the alleged political use that the country's extreme right made of the phenomenon of immigration in the central Mediterranean.

"You will have remembered all the garbage thrown against NGOs, which they call 'taxis of the sea' or 'cruise ships'. I can only say: bastards. To Meloni and (Matteo) Salvini, bastards, how can you?" he said during the show.

The writer, under police protection for his books in which he reveals mafia mechanisms, such as the successful "Gomorrah" (2006), considers this trial against him an attack on freedom of expression.

Right to criticism

On October 3, Saviano denounced the government's attacks on the judiciary and said that, with this sentence, the judge "must establish whether or not it is possible to exercise the right to criticism" in Italy.

On the other hand, in February 2023 the trial between Saviano and Salvini also began after the writer, criticizing his migration policy, called him "minister of the Mala Vita", a term that in Italy is used to refer to the mafia.

The anti-mafia leader was also denounced by Meloni's culture minister, Gennaro Sangiliano, after he said of him that "his only merit was serving the right" during his past career as a journalist and news director of the second channel of public television RAI.

In May, the Court of Rome sided with Saviano in this case and exonerated him from paying the compensation claimed by the minister.