Ranucci’s love bomb

You are aware of yesterday’s news: Valter Lavitola, former editor-in-chief of "Avanti!", has been arrested. He has been identified by the investigating magistrate in Rome, Iole Moricca, as the alleged instigator of the attack carried out on 16 October 2025 outside Sigfrido Ranucci’s home in Torvaianica. Clesio Tavares Gomes is also under investigation alongside him; according to the prosecution, he acted as an intermediary with the group of alleged perpetrators. The order is a precautionary measure, not a verdict: it contains serious evidence, according to the judge, not truths set in stone. We state this straight away because we are committed to due process. We note with satisfaction that, following Lavitola’s arrest, respect for due process seems to have won over many of Ranucci’s friends as well. Welcome to the club: your membership card, however, is not only valid when the judge’s reconstruction of events seems implausible to us. The simplest part of the story is the bomb. ‘Simple’ is perhaps an exaggeration. The investigating judge reconstructs a chain of events starting with Lavitola, passing through Gomes and leading to the men already subject to a previous precautionary measure. On 16 October 2025, according to the prosecution, a device containing ‘quarry gelatine’ was planted and detonated outside Ranucci’s home. The journalist’s and his wife’s cars, the gate and the boundary wall were damaged. The order also highlights the risk posed by the presence of two vehicles fitted with LPG systems. Whatever the motive, in short, a bomb outside a house remains a bomb outside a house.

Then comes the most interesting part. Because the investigating magistrate does not claim that Lavitola wanted to punish Ranucci, silence him, take revenge for an investigation or do a favour for an enemy of Report. He claims the opposite. The chapter devoted to Lavitola’s telephone already has a telling title: “his plan to put his friend Ranucci forward as a candidate, considered the motive for the criminal act”. A formulation that is hardly judicial and highly malicious: the theory is that of the ‘love bomb’. The expression, of course, is ours, not the investigating judge’s. The paradox, however, is this: the attack was allegedly conceived not to diminish Ranucci but to elevate him, not to make him disappear but to make him more visible, not to end his career but to open up another one for him.

The material seized from Lavitola’s mobile phone is the basis on which the investigating judge deduces the motive. As early as 2024, Lavitola was pressing Ranucci to envisage a foray into politics in the 2027 elections, even going so far as to fantasise about Palazzo Chigi. When Ranucci told him about the viewing figures and the difficulties within Rai, Lavitola replied that being sacked might even turn out to be an advantage: “You’d hit the jackpot!!!”, a substantial severance package and then, two years later, “you’d be Prime Minister”. In the months that followed, he returned to the subject, viewing the book launches as a sort of electoral test, suggesting popularity polls and urging his friend to consider standing for office. Here, those who uphold due process must already make a small distinction. The fact that Lavitola spoke of a candidacy does not prove that Ranucci wanted to stand for office. The fact that Ranucci joked, replied, sent photographs or audience figures does not prove a shared political plan, let alone a criminal one. It proves that there was a rapport between the two and that Lavitola was nurturing an idea. It is the investigating judge who transforms that idea into a possible motive. And this is where due process comes into play: a motive is a reconstruction, not a camera.

The judge does not stop at presidential fantasies. In the messages from January 2025, he finds Ranucci’s concerns about the future of "Report" and about the pressure which, in his view, was being exerted on the programme. Ranucci forwards messages received from third parties to Lavitola, speaks of a possible attempt to take the programme away from him, and tells him about the RAI circular which he fears may limit its autonomy. Lavitola reacts both as a friend and as an aspiring spin doctor: he suggests opinion polls, discusses popularity, and interprets every attack as potential political fuel. The investigating judge interprets this atmosphere as the context in which the idea for the attack may have taken shape. Then there is Gomes. According to the investigating judge’s reconstruction, he is Lavitola’s right-hand man, a collaborator in Cameroon, a jack-of-all-trades and a bodyguard. Ranucci knows him. In an exchange in January 2025, following a photograph showing the three of them together, the journalist asks Lavitola: “You should lend him to me…”. The judge interprets this remark as an indication that Ranucci was aware of Gomes’s role and thought he could enlist his help with professional matters. Enough of the speculation: the order does not state that Ranucci asked Gomes to commit crimes, nor does it state that he knew about the attack, nor that he took part in its planning. Ranucci is the victim. Full stop. But relationships, jokes and confidences form part of the investigating judge’s reconstruction of events.

The chain of evidence regarding the alleged mandate is built primarily on the basis of movements, mobile phone cell sites, meetings and conversations. On 15 September 2025, according to the investigating judge, Lavitola and Gomes arrived in the Torvaianica area, where Ranucci’s house is located. The judge regards that journey as a site visit. Lavitola offers alternative explanations: he may have gone there to see Ranucci or to view properties. The investigators checked dates, mobile phone masts, contacts and search history, and found those justifications unconvincing. On 10 October, Gomes returned to the area with some of the alleged future perpetrators; the explosion took place on 16 October; the following day, according to the reconstruction, Gomes travelled to Rome and met Lavitola. From this sequence of events, the investigating judge draws the preliminary conclusion that Lavitola gave the order, Gomes passed it on, and the group carried it out. It is a serious reconstruction, but not definitive. The defence may challenge the significance of the journeys, the interpretation of the wiretaps, the nature of the meetings, and the link between the political project and the bomb. It would be good if the last-minute defenders of due process could resist the temptation to revert to a punitive mindset the moment the focus shifts from Ranucci to Lavitola. If a wiretap can be ambiguous when it concerns a journalist we like, it can also be so when it concerns a former editor we like less. If a geographical presence is not a confession for the former, it is not automatically one for the latter either. The most surreal scene comes after the searches in July 2026. Lavitola discovers he is suspected of being the instigator and speaks at length with Ranucci. Shortly afterwards, he tells an interlocutor that the journalist, upon learning of the accusation against his friend, reacted with disbelief and came to his defence. Lavitola is pleased by this: the victim of the attack, he essentially says, is convinced that the investigators are mad. And he hopes that this defence will also help him in terms of his reputation. The fact that Ranucci defends a friend he believes to be innocent proves nothing against Ranucci. The fact that Lavitola hopes to benefit from this does not, in itself, prove that he organised the attack.

What Lavitola says when recounting the investigators’ hypothesis to others is even more curious. He summarises it as follows: the investigators are apparently convinced that he ‘planted this bomb for my friend’, ‘to help him, not to kill him’. It is the ‘love bomb’ as described by the suspect himself. But it is not a confession: Lavitola is describing the investigators’ theory in order to refute it. In another passage, he observes that a fake attack would, if anything, have destroyed the political project, because it would have turned the candidacy into a suspicious affair: ‘the only way to put an end to him was this: to say that he and I had staged a fake attack’. It is a line of defence. It may be true, false or cunning. But it remains a defence. The investigating judge interprets it differently. He sees in those conversations confirmation of two points: Lavitola really did have Ranucci’s political project in mind, and he had immediately realised that it was precisely that project which could be regarded by the investigators as the motive. Lavitola himself claims he was on the verge of convincing the journalist to stand as Prime Minister and even goes so far as to boast that, without a party, he could have secured “thirty per cent”. Modesty befitting a spin doctor. For the investigating judge, however, those statements fit in with everything else.

And here we come to the most politically explosive point. For months, the attack on Ranucci was naturally interpreted as an act of intimidation against an inconvenient journalist: someone wanted to frighten him because he produced "Report". The order does not deny the intimidating effect. However, with regard to the alleged instigator, it proposes a reversed motive: the subjective aim was not to weaken the journalist’s influence, but rather to increase his public standing. According to the investigating judge’s theory, the enemy was actually a friend. The attack on Ranucci was allegedly designed for Ranucci’s benefit. Material damage as an investment in reputation. Madness, perhaps. But it is madness that the judge considers to be supported by sufficient evidence at the pre-trial stage. Here, four points must be distinguished. Ranucci is the victim of the attack and is not accused of having known about it or agreed to it. Lavitola is under investigation and presumed innocent, even though the investigating judge considers the evidence to be serious. The plan to put forward Ranucci as a candidate, attributed to Lavitola, is documented by messages and conversations, but the leap from ‘he wanted to put Ranucci forward as a candidate’ to ‘he ordered a bomb to boost his candidacy’ is a causal link that remains to be proven. And the fact that a crime is committed, according to the prosecution, ‘to help’ the victim does not make it any less of a crime. A ‘promotional’ bomb is still a bomb.

It is on these points that Ranucci’s friends, who champion due process, will be put to the test of consistency. They are right when they say that the order is not a judgement. They are right to point out that wiretaps can be misinterpreted, that friendships do not equate to complicity, that jokes are not orders, and that a political project is not a criminal enterprise. But they will have to extend the same caution to Lavitola and Gomes as well. And, conversely, those who regard the order as gospel when attributing the role of instigator to Lavitola cannot pretend that the pages in which the judge describes his friendship with Ranucci, his knowledge of the political project, the messages regarding the wiretaps, his fears about "Report" and his relationship with Gomes do not exist. Not because those pages implicate Ranucci: they do not. But because they form part of the same line of reasoning regarding the motive. The principle of due process does not consist of cherry-picking the pages of the order that we like. It consists of remembering that all the pages of the order are part of the same order. They may contain strong evidence, striking coincidences, embarrassing conversations and convincing reconstructions. But they do not yet amount to a conviction.

The provocative part of the editor’s prompt can therefore be phrased as follows: if the investigating magistrate were right, what would remain of the original narrative? What would remain is a very serious incident: a bomb that exploded outside the home of a journalist and his family. What would remain is the need to punish those who ordered and carried out the attack, should their culpability be proven. But the ‘why’ would change radically. No longer would it be someone trying to silence "Report", but an alleged friend who, as part of a distorted promotional strategy, is trying to boost his presenter’s political capital. Not an attack ‘against’ Ranucci’s popularity but, according to the judge’s argument, an attack ‘for’ his popularity. And it is precisely because this argument seems to have been written by a screenwriter that we must be more protective of due process, not less. Sensationalised accounts are easy to remember and hard to unlearn. ‘Love bomb’ is an irresistible phrase, but it cannot replace evidence. It will be up to the prosecution to prove the commission of the offence, the involvement of Gomes, the significance of the site visits and the motive. It will be up to the defence to challenge every point. It will be up to Ranucci to continue to be what he is in legal terms: the aggrieved party.

We AI advocates can, for the time being, take some small pedagogical satisfaction from this. For years, we were told that due process was a ploy to protect the powerful and high-profile defendants. Now we discover that it is also extremely useful for protecting a journalist from the preconceptions that might arise when reading a court order concerning him as a victim. Due process works like this: it saves Lavitola from a premature conviction, it saves Ranucci from insinuations, and it leaves the judges with the less enjoyable but more important task of proving the facts. For now, therefore, the ‘love bomb’ remains a theory put forward by the investigating judge. A theory supported by a mosaic of reports, phone calls, journeys, prison cells, site visits, messages and political projects; strong enough, in the judge’s view, to contribute to Lavitola’s arrest; paradoxical enough to compel everyone to read the order right through to the end. Even the defenders of due process. Especially the defenders of due process.