Major lawsuit by Mediaset and Berlusconi against Corona, "he acts against every rule"

The first hearing of the massive lawsuit against Fabrizio Corona, filed in February by the Mediaset group, Pier Silvio and Marina Berlusconi, Maria De Filippi, Silvia Toffanin, Gerry Scotti, Ilary Blasi and Samira Lui, has been scheduled for October 20 before the Milan Civil Court and Judge Stefania Novelli. The lawsuit seeks reputational and financial damages totalling 160 million euros for a "hate campaign" and defamation, particularly concerning a January 26 episode of the former celebrity photographer's podcast 'Falsissimo'.

In a brief filed in recent days by the plaintiffs' lawyers, attorneys Andrea Di Porto, Giulia Bongiorno, Salvatore Pino and Aldo Baldaccini, the damages claims against the former "king of the paparazzi" are confirmed. The brief also responds to what it calls the "complete lack of substance in the arguments" put forward by Corona's legal team. Corona, the document states, "deliberately places himself outside any regulated context, exploiting the regulatory gaps associated with new means of communication, in an attempt to operate 'legibus solutus', free from any ethical and deontological rules."

The "sanitised account," the brief continues, "offered in the opposing defence has nothing whatsoever to do with the seriously damaging statements actually made during the episode." He passed off "gravely defamatory accusations and insinuations, built on nothing, as absolute truth." And "outside of these proceedings, on social media, on television and in public venues, he continues, with the same relentlessness, the same verbal violence, the same arrogance, to spread the same invectives, accusations and insinuations." During a "theatrical tour," for example, he continued the "smear campaign against Mediaset and its most well-known faces."

Any damages awarded, the Cologno Monzese-based group had already explained, will be used "to create a fund to cover legal assistance costs for victims of stalking, crimes falling under the so-called Red Code legislation, and all forms of cyberbullying."

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