60 years after the start of the case that would lead to his conviction for plagio
by Alessandro Amicarelli — October 12, 2024 marks the 60th anniversary of a tragic event for the Italian democracy. On that date the Aldo Braibanti case, a judicial disgrace in a republican, democratic and anti-fascist Italy, began. All the more so because the defendant on trial would shortly be a young philosophy graduate, formerly on the Italian Communist Party's central committee, formerly a partisan, accused of using plagio, the legal guise of brainwashing, to allegedly obtain sexual favors from younger boys.
Aldo Braibanti was a homosexual and in 1964 in Italy this was intolerable and therefore he had to be depicted to the public as a manipulative monster. The newspapers were competing for the headline, presenting him as the professor who had taken advantage of two young students. But Braibanti was not, nor was he ever, a professor, and those two “students,” were not his students but were in fact one a college student and the other an electrician, all the more both over the age of 18. The story is unbelievable and sounds like something taken from a medieval witch-hunting manual.
On Oct. 12, 1964, the father of one of those two boys, Ippolito Sanfratello, father of Giovanni, the alleged victim of plagio, filed a complaint with the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office against Aldo Braibanti, accusing him of the crime of plagio for having induced his son, by entering his mind, to have sexual relations with him. Giovanni, according to another common chapter in the script of some countries, will be subjected to continuous electroshocks and held for a long time in an asylum under psychiatric care to be purified from plagio, or subjected to techniques that in the terminology of modern anti-cultists is called deprogramming, that they have long practiced after the kidnapping of the alleged victim.
Braibanti's story is long and painful not only for the victim himself, but for the democracy and the Italian institutions also victims of the methods, exhumed and in truth never extinct, of the fascist dictatorship. The crime of plagio, introduced into the Italian national legal system by the Fascist regime with the Rocco Code, unknown from the pre-existing Zanardelli Code (the penal code of post-unification of Italy), was a very dangerous weapon in that, as the Braibanti case shows, a simple accusation without evidence and even with the testimony to the contrary of the alleged victim (of sexual abuse in this case) that this had been instead fully consensual, could lead, as would have happened for Braibanti, to a certain although unjust as well as irrational conviction.
On that October 12, 1964, post-fascist Italy, barely 18 years old, awoke passionate about fascist methods, and public opinion, obnubilated by unscrupulous journalists, was being watered down with lies on the skin of an innocent man.
Giovanni never accused Braibanti; on the contrary, he had a romantic relationship with him and they lived together in Rome.
During the trial it was the other young man, Piercarlo Toscani, then an electrician, who accused Braibanti of having “entered his mind” thereby supporting the theory of Sanfratello's father, the accuser.
On July 14, 1968, the Rome Assize Court sentenced Braibanti to 9 years, reduced on appeal on Sept. 27, 1969 to 4 years, then reduced further to 2 as he was a former partisan.
The Radical Party, with Marco Pannella in the forefront, took action to defend Braibanti, along with leading cultural figures, such as Umberto Eco, Alberto Moravia, Pierpaolo Pasolini and Elsa Morante, and gave birth to a cultural movement against the oppression wanted by the fanatical accusers of plagio.
A dark page for the Italian democracy, with a constitution inspired to the principles of anti-fascism, but which in reality had maintained so many structures, including institutional and legal ones, of that regime, and above all the mentality of the Italians was, then as unfortunately in part now, still inextricably anchored to the Ventennio.
One had to wait until 1981 when, in an Italian society that had at least partly changed, and in which shortly thereafter the “State religion” would be relegated to the attic in 1984, albeit in an unfinished way, the Constitutional Court intervened, not in the Braibanti case, but in that of Don Grasso, a Catholic priest , sanctioning the contrariety of Article 603 of the Penal Code to the Italian Constitution.
It is certainly interesting to note that the judges did not intervene to sanction plagio as contrary to the Constitution in the case of Braibanti, a communist and homosexual, but they did so in the case of Don Grasso accused by parents of boys from wealthy families of having committed plagio on their children to persuade them to go and volunteer in poor countries. The Italian anti-cult continue to advocate the usefulness of plagio, asserting that article 603 was abolished only because involved in that case was a manipulative Catholic priest. It is obvious that this reasoning is as consistent as the whole agenda of the anti-cultists. It is clear that the Italian society of 1964, still very close to the Ventennio, was very different from the Italy of 1981, much changed in customs and habits. Just as very different is the Italian society of today, in which it is quite normal for young or old, religious or spiritual, atheist or agnostic, from more or less wealthy families to leave as volunteers around the world. 40 years ago this was seen as the result of mind manipulation carried out by a priest, perhaps perceived as a subversive or “leftist” priest whom families of some prominence saw as a danger and wanted to take out using the fascist weapon of the then existing plagio offense.
The wise constitutional judges operated a real caesura with the past that never again should come back. Instead, that illiberal shadow continues to lurk like a sharp weapon ready to metaphorically cut off the head of anyone who threatens order as identified by the anti-cultists in the “normality of the majority.” Any difference is dangerous to them and must be suppressed.
Today after 60 years since the tragic events of the Braibanti case, after the Constitutional Court declared plagio unconstitutional in 1981, we are certainly not free from fanatics and populists of various kinds who, seeing minorities as dangers to be persecuted for their diversity, would like to fight them with the legal instrument i.e. by prosecuting them for plagio renamed mental manipulation.
It is not surprising that anti-cult activists and representatives of populist parties and the xenophobic, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic reality are often on the same page. And it is not a matter of mere political color since populism and persecution are across the board.
These harassments, although devoid of the legal instrument of punishment, at least in Italy, continue in various ways. The victims change, the perpetrators change, but the modes are the same.
The witch hunt continues. And so a Russian doctor who had supported the LGBTIQ+ community, considered in Russia to be an extremist cult on a par with Jehovah's Witnesses outlawed in 2017 despite Putin's own opposition, was arrested on Oct. 7 on charges of Satanism (as reported by The Moscow Times and Bitter Winter). Accusations of Satanism also made in France against an artistic work by François Delarozière. In this case the accusation of Satanism comes from Catholic circles as as reported by the Manifesto. But it makes little difference, because accusations of Satanism and Sectarianism are being made by religious and nonreligious subjects, by anti-cult groups (Catholics) and anti-cult groups (secularists) who believe they hold the only truth. The tools are the same, demonization, it is the case to say, of those deemed to be dangerous cults or manipulative gurus and a legal tool to annihilate the spiritual leader and the group with all the faithful in the name of a normality that does not tolerate diversity. In the name of conforming to the mass where there is no room for anyone who thinks, dresses or behaves or looks differently.
It is no wonder that anti-cult groups, both in Italy and elsewhere, take the French and Russian models as examples, both along the lines of the Chinese model, which harass and persecute religious and spiritual minority groups in France, and religious, spiritual, sexual and political minority groups in Russia and China.
The same people who preach the freedom of women, as of men, to practice sex freely, to change partners, to ultimately do what one wants with one's body, as is only right if one wants it, are then the same ones who label as victims of plagio those who freely and with full consent decide to practice a type of sexuality in the form of tantric yoga, sacred eroticism or any other form of eroticism or sexuality. When this happens they cry out for scandal, abuse, and manipulative guru, no matter that the alleged victims continue to claim that they gave full consent to the relationship because, in a fully psychiatric view, the anti-cultists claim that the alleged victim is not mentally capable, just as the Muslim woman would not be free in that she is subservient to the man at all times, not to mention those who convert to Islam, especially if they are women, or to any other religion, spirituality or even philosophy of life, including even vegetarianism and veganism, leading them to be seen as manipulated victims and themselves in turn extremists and manipulators.
Any individual, beyond gender and sexual, political, religious or spiritual orientation, including humanists and nonbelievers, has the right to determine his or her own life and choices according to his or her own will.
Think of the struggles of LGBTIQ+ organizations for civil unions, feminists for abortion, the struggles of radical parties and movements for divorce, abortion and end-of-life regulation, including the “death clinics” operating in Switzerland, Northern Europe and elsewhere. In a society so changed from 40-60 years ago, like it or not, individuals are free to choose, and the presence of an instrument such as the crime of plagio or manipulation would carry the risk of creating new monsters, of prosecuting family members and doctors, for example, of patients who respectively choose to abort or die peacefully, accusing them of inducing them to abort or die.
The Constitutional Court expressed itself clearly in 1981, and as FOB, and personally, we trust that we are not going back half a century or more.
It also marvels, to some extent, that a godmother or one of the inspirational muses of the anti-cultists Prof. Janja Lalich, an American daughter of emigrants from Serbia, a former communist and avowed lesbian, who has devoted the last 40 years fighting against “cults,” confessed in a recent article that she was an activist in the high ranks of an American communist party, the Democratic Workers Party - which in truth was a kind of diffuse Marxist-Leninist-inspired club that had no more than 120-150 active members who freely used drugs and practiced promiscuous sex (as was in use in many circles in the 1960s-70s) - and which she now considers to be a kind of a cult in which she allegedly practiced terrible things, as she recently claimed, including inducing women forcibly to have abortions, a refrain she herself has used against Scientology but, to the best of our knowledge, she does not seem to have ever spoken out against the mass abortions, those indeed forced abortions, practiced in China.
It is astonishing that this accusation of sectarianism should be made by an anti-religious secularist against the political group to which she belonged and in which she evidently nourished her own anti-religious sentiment, which she has fruitfully carried forward for the past 40 years.
It is unclear whether Lalich has also become to some extent an anti-abortionist, if so certain to the peace of mind of feminists and other women's rights activists in general.
What is certain is that her work influences many anti-cultists who often stretch the concept of a cult beyond all bounds.
Indeed, it is not surprising that the “cult” cliché is used by many anti-cultists to target even well-known companies that sell vacuum cleaners, plastic containers or telephones. Some even cast suspicion on the UAAR - Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics, guilty of participating in an event at the Chamber of Deputies together with groups that are disliked by anti-cultists, which instead carries out their own initiatives, as permitted by current national and international regulations, and as such, deserving respect for this.
To the anti-cultists everything is a cult. And taking the concept to extremes we are all a cult paraphrasing the third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson who argued I am of a sect by myself" (1819).
We must remain vigilant and oppose any initiative, by anyone, intended to suppress the freedoms of others, including the risk of reintroduction in Italy, as elsewhere, of the crime of plagio in any form or name and with any overt or covert purpose.
And while waiting to reintroduce that crime, anti-religious activists are doing everything, including leaking the names of asylum seekers who are members of minority groups facing persecution in China, by posting that data on the Internet.
Witch hunts have no limits, and our FOB organization in the past nearly 10 years of activity, and we as components in our activities over many more years, have demonstrated by advocating a mature and respectful secularism for all, that we stand on the side of those “witches,” and in this regard we applaud the initiative advanced in the Netherlands by three activists to build monuments in memory of the victims of the local witch hunt as reported by The Guardian last Oct. 4.
It should be unnecessary to point out that individually and as FOB we are against all forms of violence, whether it takes place within religious or spiritual or variously secular groups, but we specify this for the anti-cultists who erroneously claim that defenders of cults, actually minority religious and spiritual movements, would cover up crimes under the guise of religious freedom. This is not only false but is against the very logic of those of us who defend human rights and do not condone any violence that, on the contrary, should be prosecuted using existing laws.
We carry on with our work with the motivation with which we began and which we greatly brought to fruition in so many initiatives including the International Conference “Law and Freedom of Belief in Europe: an arduous journey” held in Florence under the High Patronage of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe and to which the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella granted the President's Medal for the contribution made at the cultural and social level.
These are our principles rooted in the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we carry forward through the contributions of so many academics, professionals, young and old, activists and volunteers from all walks of life.
