Prosecutor appeals against acquittals of Lucarelli jr and others of sexual assault

The General Prosecutor's Office of Milan has challenged, with an appeal to the Supreme Court, the sentence with which the Court of Appeal, last April 23, fully acquitted "because the fact does not exist" the two young footballers Mattia Lucarelli, 26 years old and son of the former Livorno striker Cristiano, and Federico Apolloni, the same age, and three of their friends of the accusation of having abused a 22-year-old American student four years ago.

The second instance, in fact, accepting the line of the defenders, including the lawyers Leonardo Cammarata and Francesca Nobili, had swept away the sentences of 3 years and 7 months of imprisonment for Lucarelli junior and Apolloni, 2 years and 8 months for one accused and 2 years and 5 months for the other two, which had also arrived after the arrests, with house arrest measures, in January 2023. While the investigations, conducted by the Police and coordinated by the prosecutor Alessia Menegazzo, had also gone through an evidentiary incident to crystallize the girl's version after her report on the alleged gang rape dating back to the night between 26 and 27 March 2022.

For the Milanese Court of Appeal, however, as written in the reasons, it remained a "fragile and inadequately corroborated hypothesis" that Lucarelli junior and the others had exerted "subtle pressure" and taken advantage of the student's "impaired capacity for resistance", altered by alcohol but not to the point of "being dazed". For the judges, since there was no proof of "a concrete inductive activity capable of vitiating the consent" of the young woman, "one of the essential elements of the accusatory reconstruction" was missing.

In the abbreviated reasons for the first instance, filed in September 2024, the preliminary hearing judge Roberto Crepaldi, however, had spoken of a "collective action, aimed at obtaining the consent" of the girl "to sexual acts with the greatest number of them, despite full awareness of the state of alteration".

The appeal of the deputy prosecutor Massimo Gaballo, who had asked for the convictions to be confirmed, is along this line. The annulment of the acquittals is now requested with postponement for a new trial on appeal.