How’d Amanda Knox prosecutor get Google to shoot the messenger?

 Google slammed the door yesterday on Perugia Shock, Frank Sfarzo’s popular Amanda Knox blog, caving to pressure from prosecutor Giuliano Mignini. Convicted of abuse of office in 2009, Mignini is famous for harassing and wiretapping journalists who get too close to his investigations. The obsession we need to do our jobs he regards as madness.  He doesn’t appreciate Frank’s acid critiques of the global spectacle known as “The Amanda Show.”
Mignini has filed a lawsuit against Perugia Shock for  “defamation, carried out by means of a website,” reports the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). “The court order, which stemmed from Mignini’s claim, was issued on February 23 by Florentine Judge Paola Belsito. ”
Turns out Google got the word on March 25 via a fax from Florence’s lowly postal police. The giant U.S. company gave up Frank today–not with a bang or even a whimper. One would think Perugia Shock dealt with Italian national security, not a show trial.Many case observers thought Perugia Shock was bulletproof because a giant U.S. company hosted it but, no, Google required nothing more than an irate provincial prosecutor.

Does this look like freedom of expression? Couldn’t Google wait for an investigation or, like, a trial? Why is a lion pretending to be a lamb?

Smart, enigmatic, fond of hand-rolled cigarettes, Frank is the only reporter to cover every single hearing, the one Italian who writes in English for a global audience. Still, he lives in a land where the press slipped into  “partly free” in 2009, according to Freedom House.

His life in Perugia is a horror tale. As CPJ has documented, the price he’s paid for covering the Knox case ranges from being kicked by a cop in the courthouse to a brutal beating in October  by five officers, after which he spent a night in jail. They’ve now charged him with assault. So he faces two court actions and is looking at big fines and even jail time. In short: his treatment parallels the jailing of Mario Spezi, co-author of the Monster of Florence, who also ran afoul of Mignini.

When I spoke to Frank about Google’s action, he said he wasn’t sure how he’d defamed the prosecutor.“What did you say to anger Mignini?” I asked.“The truth!” “Google did it and did not tell me why, but that it was a judge order. I learned by email,” he’d told West Seattle Herald by phone from Perugia yesterday. “The lawsuit went to the court in Florence, and the judge in Florence made a decree of seizure of the blog.”

In an open letter to the president of Italy, prestigious CPJ described his beating as well as the petty harassment that cops practice against him in the courtroom (which I’ve witnessed first hand). Today, CPJ called on authorities to “drop the trumped-up defamation lawsuit against Perugia Shock.”

Several weeks ago, Google lost a defamation case in Italy, sparked by its own use of ”autocomplete suggestions” in search. Before that, three Google executives were convicted of invasion of privacy over a YouTube video that showed  the bullying of a child with Down’s Syndrome.

Frank Sfarzo appears often in Murder In Italy, my Amanda Knox book. But I’ll let him speak for himself. Here’s his final blog. And, yes, I do have a call into Google. I’ll update when I get more information.

THOSE STRANGE COINCIDENCES

Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, the independent experts who were supposed to deliver their study on knife and bra clasp to the court next May 9, just asked for a postponement. It seems that their attention is now towards a possible contamination occurred outside the test. They are right because, as we know, that DNA doesn’t fit any logic, it simply can’t be there. Non-blood DNA on the blade requires another explanation than the knife being the murder weapon. And even for the bra clasp, as we shall see, there are some problems…

THE LAST FAMOUS WORDS 

‘Patrick killed Meredith’

‘No, Amanda killed Meredith’

‘They called the 112 after the postal police arrived’

‘We surprised them while doing laundry’

‘There was glass on the clothes’

‘Amanda thrown her sweatshirt’

‘There’s a bleach receipt’

‘There was a strong bleach smell’

‘Raffaele brought his bloody shirt to the laundry’

‘The shoe-print is Raffaele’s’

‘The shoe-print on the pillowcase is Amanda’s’

‘We had the intuition that the knife was the murder weapon’

‘Raffaele was cutting girls in Puglia’

‘You are HIV positive, good night’

‘Amanda was a drug addict and was having sex with drug dealers’

…

 Impressive: not even one right thing. Not to mention what they are forced to admit in order to justify themselves:
‘Amanda said Patrick was the killer and yes, we believed her’ (!)
‘We didn’t know who Patrick was, so we had not even studied the phone printouts’(!)
’Yes, we didn’t record the interrogations’(!)
‘Yes, we burned 4 computers (!) And we didn’t pay damages’(not yet)
‘Yes, we weren’t able not even to find Nara who lives right there’(!)
‘Yes, we knew there weren’t buses that night and we didn’t say anything, we forgot’(!)
‘Yes, we turned the house upside-down while the scientific police still hadn’t finished their job’(!)
‘Yes, we weren’t able to find the bra clasp during three inspections. (!) The biologists can do our own job better than us: they came from Rome and found it immediately’ (!)
….
Mignini didn’t arrest these people. Mignini and Manuela Comodi defend these people.
But these people don’t defend Mignini and Comodi: they said ‘Goodbye, your problem now!’