An Italian appeals court has cleared a man accused of sexually assaulting a flight attendant because she took 20 seconds to react to him groping her, in a case that has provoked a furious backlash in the country.
The case dates back to March 2018, when the flight attendant approached a trade union worker for help with a dispute at work. During a meeting at the union’s office in Malpensa, Raffaele Meola allegedly sexually assaulted the unnamed victim.
The woman sought help from the Differenza Donna sexual assault charity, and the alleged crime was reported to police, who pursued a prosecution against the suspect.
Meola was found not guilty by a Milan court during the first trial in 2022 on similar grounds that the flight attendant had taken too long to react to the suspect’s sexual advances.
With the help of Differenza Donna, the woman appealed the verdict but the Court of Appeal of Milan has now backed the original verdict, claiming that the 20 seconds it took for the woman to tell Meola to get off her was too long.
“This sentence takes us back 30 years,” slammed Maria Teresa Manente, the victim’s lawyer.
Manente says the appeals court ignored legal precedence that a “sexual act, carried out in a sudden, devious, sudden manner without ascertaining the woman’s consent, is a crime of sexual violence”.
The victim’s lawyer now says they plan to appeal the verdict to the Italian Supreme Court.
The court had previously ruled that the woman was believed but that there was insufficient evidence to find Meola guilty because she didn’t immediately reject his advances when he started to massage her shoulders and kiss her.
The ruling stated that Meola could be mistaken for believing he had consent because she did not immediately tell him to stop.
Differenza Donna has called for a new law that could give women more protection in the case of sexual assault.
This is one of those things where the written/spoken words “20 seconds” is perceived as a briefer span of time than it truly is.
Take a watch or stopwatch and run 20 seconds on it. Then do it again, and this time imagine being assaulted for that whole span of time before you raise any form of objection.
Ah, that’s amore! Nice to see that Italy is still in the Don Draper days where no meant yes.
Reprehensible… but what was she doing during said 20 seconds?