This Is, Yet Again, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
A man tries to sexually assault a hotel cleaner in Malta. He pleads guilty. And yet, the court decides that his name must not be published because he claimed it might harm his political career. Not his life. Not his safety. Not even his mental health. Just his career.
It’s the kind of sentence you’d expect to read in satire, not in a court transcript. But here we are.
The man in question is a 59-year-old Swiss national who followed a cleaner into his hotel room, stripped naked, and grabbed her while trying to kiss her neck and face. She managed to escape and did the right thing – she told her employer, she reported the incident, and she trusted that Malta’s justice system would handle it like any decent justice system should.
But the system had other ideas. Because when he was brought before the court, his defence lawyer asked for his name to be withheld from the public record – and the magistrate agreed. Why? Because the man was supposedly a “politically exposed person.” In other words, his reputation was too valuable to risk damaging.
No one appears to have asked for evidence. No one verified the claim. No one pushed back. The prosecution, for reasons unknown, did not object. The magistrate, Leonard Caruana, took the man’s word at face value, despite the fact that the man had just admitted to a violent sexual offence against an unsuspecting worker who was simply doing her job.
The court accepted the defence’s argument that publishing his name might ruin his professional and political prospects, and so it did what it never should have done: it prioritised the future of the aggressor over justice for the victim.
Days later, Swiss media revealed that the man had never held public office. His “exposure” consisted of unsuccessfully contesting a seat in a small-town local election in Switzerland. That’s it. He was a nobody with a fake title, and he played the Maltese courts like a fiddle.
And here’s the part that should really make your blood boil: even if he had been a genuine “politically exposed person,” the judgement would still have been indefensible.
In every functioning democracy, we are told that those in political life must be held to higher standards than the rest of us – not given special protection. Their personal conduct matters because we are asked to trust them with administering the very systems we all live under. The public has a right to know if someone seeking or holding political office is the kind of person who assaults women in hotel rooms. That isn’t invasion of privacy; it’s accountability.
He lied, and the court believed him. But more dangerously, the court accepted a logic that undermines one of the most basic principles of democratic society.
We should all be embarrassed. And yes, the story has been widely shared, with plenty of people questioning why the man’s identity was protected. Victim Support Malta was quick to call the publication ban harmful, warning that it sends the message that, if you hold enough perceived power or influence, you can commit crimes without facing full consequences. They’re right.
And yet, for a case this outrageous, the public reaction still feels strangely muted. I expected the outrage to be louder and more sustained. After all, this is the same country that introduced femicide as a separate offence to signal our seriousness about protecting women.
We’ve updated our laws, we’ve staged awareness campaigns, and we’ve promised, over and over again, that women will be protected and believed.
Except, apparently, when the guy who assaults them says he might one day run for mayor.
Let’s not pretend this is about legal nuance. This is not some fine point of judicial interpretation or a grey area of the law. This was bad judgement. Plain and simple.
And that’s the real issue here – not just this one man, or this one case, but the fact that we consistently fail to hold our judiciary to high standards. Some of our magistrates are competent, principled, and deserve to be on the bench. But far too many are not. Whether it’s due to political appointments, lack of training, poor salaries, or the fact that the job just doesn’t attract the best and brightest – the result is the same. We get mediocrity. Or worse.
Magistrates who cannot grasp basic democratic principles have no business presiding over anything, let alone criminal courts.
It’s not about setting precedent. The man was a foreigner, he’s unlikely to return, and it’s doubtful we’ll ever see this exact scenario play out again. But the damage is done — because every time something like this happens, it chips away at whatever shred of credibility the system still has.
This isn’t the first time a magistrate has made a baffling, offensive, or outright shameful decision – and it won’t be the last. But we’ve grown numb to it. Resigned, even. As if the occasional miscarriage of justice is just part of the package.
A woman was assaulted at work. She had no power. No influence. No lawyer. No “career” to protect. And yet she had the strength to report what happened. In return, the man who assaulted her walked away with a suspended sentence and his reputation preserved.
He’ll go back to Switzerland and maybe try his luck at another local election. She’ll go back to work, carrying the weight of what happened – and the knowledge that when it mattered most, the system didn’t stand with her. It protected him.
This is, yet again, why we can’t have nice things.
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