Legal aid. Ossigeno helps the reporter that “battle against reckless libel complaints”

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A contribution to the defence costs incurred by Nazareno Di Noi , director of  a daily in Apulia, for a libel lawsuit launched by the mayor and dismissed by the judge

The Free Legal Aid Office of Ossigeno (see here) which works in collaboration with Media Defence awarded a cash contribution to cover partially the legal costs of the journalist Nazareno Dinoi, who recounted his experience in this text written for Ossigeno.

OSSIGENO November 26^th 2021 – by Nazareno Dinoi –

I knew of the “Ossigeno per l’Informazione” Observatory but not the possibility of free legal aid which covered part of the legal expenses I incurred in defending the umpteenth lawsuit for alleged defamation now definitively dismissed.

The support which the lawyer Andrea Di Pietro provided me with was fundamental for my work, not only for the financial aspect but above all for the moral one. It is the first time that I have not felt alone in what had become an almost daily battle against vexatious litigation made solely to suppress free information.

My case concerns an article published in my newspaper “La Voce di Manduria” entitled “Salina, among the lido projects also one of the Tommasino family”, in which the project for a beach resort in  a protected area was proposed by the wife of the then mayor of Manduria, Paolo Tommasino.

The first citizen considered the article “widely defamatory” precisely because of the expression “Tommasino family” used in the title as if to make people believe in the exercise of “an economic or other power, when in truth – claimed the former mayor -, it simply evokes the initiative of a modest entrepreneur who, with great sacrifices, putting profit in the background, intends to devote herself to the tourist development of the area, without in the least undermining  respect for the environment”».

For the judge who acquitted me, however, the expression “Tommasino family” did not seem to have specific defamatory or insinuating connotations and that “the start of a business activity by a person linked to another person by marriage – writes the investigating judge in dismissing the case-, is never a choice and / or an activity carried out “alone” considering the inevitable repercussions on the family assets that a project of this type can have “.

For this reason, the judge ordered the dismissal of the case which had also been requested by the public prosecutor and which Tommasino had opposed.

Nazareno Dinoi

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