Sexual violence, Rome prosecutor requests dismissal for Senator Silvestro

The Rome prosecutor's office has requested the dismissal of the sexual assault proceedings against Forza Italia senator Francesco Silvestro, accused of raping a woman in his Senate office in 2025.

This was made known by the lawyer Teresa Manente, head of the Legal Office of Differenza Donna and defender of the offended party, a 52-year-old entrepreneur, underlining that "the request for dismissal is based exclusively on a question relating to the prosecution of the crime" and that "it does not deny, on the merits, the woman's story". According to what was reported by Repubblica, the magistrates' decision is based exclusively on the lateness of the complaint presented by the victim.

The Prosecutor and the Prosecutor's Office: "The victim's story is not questioned"

According to the public prosecutor's view, Differenza Donna continues, the conditions for prosecution would not be met since the offended person filed a complaint beyond the terms established by law, more than a year after the violence.

It is, therefore, a request which, Manente maintains, "does not contain any negative assessment of the reliability of the offended person and does not deny, on the merits, the story she gave. On the contrary, significant elements are found in the documents which are consistent with the woman's reconstruction. In particular, a witness who had the opportunity to meet her immediately after the events described her 'deep disturbance, tears and state of upheaval' due to what happened".

Even the fact that the woman, in the very first moments following the events, "did not immediately and fully represent the gravity of the violence she had suffered cannot be read - we read in the request for dismissal according to what Manente reports - as an indication of unreliability".

"The difficulty of naming and describing a sexual assault immediately constitutes - he concludes - a phenomenon widely known in the scientific literature and in the experience gained in working with women victims of violence. Shock, shame, fear, sense of guilt, fear of judgment or of not being believed can determine initially partial, fragmented or progressively more complete stories".

Defender Silvestro: "We take note of the request for dismissal, no admissibility condition"

"We take note of the request for dismissal, the content of which we do not yet know. If the prosecutor's office has requested the dismissal of the proceedings considering the complaint to be late, and therefore the condition of admissibility is missing, it cannot be ruled out that it has carried out investigations on the merits capable of considering the hypothesized crime to be abstractly configurable and in any case to evaluate the reliability of the sources".

This was stated by the lawyer Roberto Guida, defender of the Fi senator Rancesco Silvestro interviewed by Adnkronos on the request for dismissal by the Rome prosecutor's office for the accusation of sexual violence after a woman's complaint.

“I reserve every consideration for the outcome of the reading of the document, which can only be seen by the complainant”, concludes the criminal lawyer.