Ranucci and the lawsuits. The whistleblower was once a hero; now he is a spy

“It’s strange how a descent, when viewed from below, looks so much like an ascent,” says Goofy, the naive Disney character and friend of the more shrewd Mickey Mouse. This sudden yet banal epiphany is the very same one that must have struck Sigfrido Ranucci and the editorial team at Report on matters of the right to criticise and the right to information. Until recently, any complaint lodged against Report’s journalists was regarded as a means of silencing those who ask uncomfortable questions. They were all ‘frivolous lawsuits’, or SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), as those who like to use English terms put it. Now that they are seeing that same descent from the bottom up, the Report team and its captain are using the weapons of complaints and lawsuits against journalists to tackle the climb following the explosion of the Ranucci-Lavitola case. The latest victim of the ‘Pippo-Report’ method is "Il Tempo", the newspaper edited by Daniele Capezzone, guilty of having published the salaries of the journalists on Ranucci’s team. The Report correspondents have announced a lawsuit “to protect their reputation and their work”. 

It is Ranucci himself who admits that the lawsuit is frivolous when he writes on Facebook: “Serious disclosure of a strategic internal document for the company, given that it makes public the production costs of one of Rai’s flagship programmes, such as Report”. If the document is “strategic”, then that means it is not false and therefore cannot be defamatory. Alongside the lawsuit, Ranucci has lodged a complaint with Rai’s Ethics Committee to uncover the source – the ‘whistleblower’, as those who like to speak in English call them – who leaked the ‘sensitive document’. The whistleblower, a key figure for those who defend investigative journalism, is now, from a bottom-up perspective, seen as an enemy of corporate interests: they must be prosecuted and punished.

This is not the only such case. It already happened a month ago, when Gino Zavalani from Esperia drew attention to passages in Ranucci’s book in which the author described his sexual relationships with sources and interns at Report. Zavalani said that the tip-off had come to him from the Report editorial team. Ranucci immediately issued a threat of legal action, using the typical formula employed by politicians: “It is false; he has no sources within Report. I have already instructed my solicitor.”

The Report team has filed further complaints. On 13 July, a few days after the search of Valter Lavitola’s premises, Ranucci and his colleagues lodged a complaint regarding the “disclosure of news and extracts from documents covered by investigative secrecy” that had appeared in Domani and Verità. At Report, they have always made extensive and casual use of documents covered by investigative secrecy, but suddenly realised that, viewed from the outside, the practice is not legal. Ranucci then sued the journalists who had critically analysed the attack he suffered – in light of his close relationship with Lavitola, the instigator of the attack – for “aggravated defamation and other offences”, on the grounds that, through “statements, press articles, conjectures and insinuations which, by means of explicit allusions, the victim of the serious attack into its alleged beneficiary, through expressions stating or suggesting a ‘staged attack’ and other similar formulations, and the resulting benefits”. A textbook example of a reckless lawsuit. Because what Ranucci considers defamatory is precisely the reconstruction of the facts by the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office, confirmed by the investigating judge and, ultimately, acknowledged (at least in part) by Lavitola: the attack was ‘staged’, in the sense that there was no intention to harm Ranucci but rather to bolster his image, and Ranucci was the beneficiary in the sense that the attack increased his popularity. “Lavitola’s clear-headed thinking”, writes the investigating judge, sees the attacks on Ranucci as “a formidable tool” for boosting his popularity, which “an attack such as the one actually suffered [by Ranucci] can increase exponentially”. And this is indeed what happened and, according to the judge, what Ranucci himself observed, given that in his messages with Lavitola, his “outbursts” regarding his professional difficulties ceased “after the criminal act had been carried out” and, at the same time, Ranucci “gladly shared with his friend opinion polls or comments demonstrating the surge in popularity he was experiencing”. In practice, to defend themselves against Ranucci’s frivolous complaint, the defendants need only present Lavitola’s arrest warrant.

The paradoxical aspect of this story is that, immediately after the attack, when nothing was known about the perpetrators or the motive, the line taken was to withdraw the legal claims against “Report” in order to defend freedom of information: this was the request put forward by both the left (Sandro Ruotolo of the PD) and the right (Francesco Storace, formerly of the MSI-AN). Instead, following the search of Lavitola’s premises and his confession – that is, once the picture began to take shape in terms of its dynamics and key players – it is Ranucci and ‘Report’ who are now launching a barrage of legal complaints against journalists and critics. The descent, once the truth was uncovered, has become an ascent. And it is not the legal complaints that will make it any less steep.