Abuse of a 15 year old on Halloween, the Prosecutor's Office against acquittal

The Turin Juvenile Prosecutor's Office asks the Court of Appeal to overturn the acquittal of the two defendants, aged 14 and 15 at the time of the facts, who had been accused of having harassed a peer with intellectual and mental disabilities for over twelve hours, between 31 October and 1 November 2025. Both were acquitted last summer. According to the judges of first instance, it would have been an evening of heavy pranks "without criminally relevant coercion", reports La Stampa.

But prosecutors Vitina Pinto and Virginia Pecoriello do not agree. A third person, a 16-year-old girl, with a partial role in the incident, had instead admitted and asked for probation. The report to the police was made by the fifteen-year-old himself, together with his mother.

The woman had also told the story in a post on social media about the incident that took place in an apartment in Turin and had reported hours of abuse to the military. His son was allegedly burned on the ankle with a cigarette, had his hair shaved except for a few tufts and partly also his eyebrows, sexually abused and forced to enter the water of the Dora river, filming sequences of what happened. The three would finally abandon him in the city, giving him back the cell phone they had deprived him of.

His mother was then able to track him down. She had explained to the police that she had only realized in the morning that he had never arrived at his grandfather's, where he was supposed to spend the night. The story had caused an outcry, including a street demonstration near the fifteen-year-old's home, as well as insulting posts on the social profiles of those under investigation at the time. Then last March the boy wrote a rap song that intended to retrace those moments. "I was beaten at 3 am inside a bathroom" on that "night that didn't laugh". "You don't know what it's like to have a knife put to your throat, to be shaved clean" are some of the words in the music.

In the appeal, the prosecutors retrace every action suffered by the teenager that night: private violence, kidnapping and group sexual violence are the crimes whose existence the prosecutor reiterates, writes the newspaper. The premise of the entire accusatory reasoning is that, for something to be "shared", "reciprocity" is needed, therefore "equivalence": all participants must be on the same level, able to understand what they are doing, full consent is needed. A form of authentic consent that they believe was missing.