A panel of three females judges in Italy dismissed an alleged rape victim’s story as not believable because she was “unattractive.”
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside a court of appeal in Ancona after the acquittal of two men on rape charges, reported The Local Italy.
The judges ruled the alleged victim, 22 at the time, was “too masculine” and the men were not attracted to her.
Video footage from local media showed demonstrators shouting “for shame” and accusing the Italian justice system of misogyny.
Protesters from an Italian women’s rights group called Rebel Network wrote on Twitter: “Rape does not fulfill a desire for pleasure, but an abominable hatred and contempt for the victim. It does not depend on how feminine you are, but on the hatred inside the rapist.”
The reasons for the 2017 ruling were discovered on Friday, when Italy’s highest appeal court ordered a retrial of the case, reported the Cronoche Ancona daily paper.
The Ancona appeals court threw out a 2016 conviction of rape, which allegedly took place in 2015.
The woman had claimed one of the men raped her while the other stood guard after they had spiked her drink with drugs.
Doctors, who found traces of a date-rape drug in her blood, concluded her injuries were consistent with rape.
The judges, however, said it could not be ruled out that the alleged victim planned the events surrounding the alleged rape.
They argued the man accused of rape “didn’t even like the girl, to the point of having stored her number in his phone under the nickname ‘Viking,’ an allusion to an anything but feminine figure, rather a masculine one.”
The judges said the photograph “present in her file would appear to confirm this.”
The case will be reheard by a court in Perugia.
FoxNews.com reported the unnamed victim is of Peruvian origin.
