Google silences blog critical of Amanda Knox prosecutor

 
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.