In a well-publicized case that caused public outrage and reignited the nation’s discussion of violence against women, a 23-year-old Italian man was sentenced to life in prison after confessing to stabbing his ex-girlfriend.
Filippo Turetta was found guilty by a Venice court on Tuesday of killing Guilia Cecchettin, 22, in November 2023, just after she ended her relationship with him and one week before she was scheduled to receive her degree from the University of Padua.
Turetta, according to the court, stabbed the biomedical engineering student seventy times before putting her body in trash bags and throwing it in a ditch. After her death was found seven days later, he escaped to Germany and was caught there.
Turetta was convicted of unlawfully possessing weapons, kidnapping, and concealing a corpse. Turetta acknowledged killing Cecchettin but denied it was planned. In addition, he was mandated to cover Cecchettin’s family’s legal costs and damages.
Last year, there were over 100 occurrences of femicide in Italy, mostly committed by family members or intimate partners, including Cecchettin’s murder.
After information of Turetta’s possessiveness and Cecchettin’s attempts to break up with her surfaced, the country was rocked by the student’s death. Last December, about 10,000 people showed up for her burial.
A few months before to her passing, Cecchettin wrote a list titled “15 Reasons I Had to Break Up With Him,” which her family published to increase awareness of domestic abuse.
She mentioned that he would be upset if she didn’t give him enough emojis and listed prerequisites for her to assist him in his studies. Turetta further admitted that he could not tolerate anything other than reuniting with her in an 80-page declaration written in infantile handwriting from jail.
But Cecchettin’s sister, Elena Cecchettin, made impassioned remarks that sparked a political uproar and rekindled the public discussion about female roles and sexism in Italian society.
Elena said that Turetta was a healthy offspring of a patriarchal society rather than a monster in an essay published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra.
A monster is an anomaly, someone outside of society, and someone that society shouldn’t be accountable for. According to a Google translation, she wrote in November 2023, “And instead the responsibility exists.”
Cecchettin’s family and opposition parties criticized the far-right government when Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara claimed last month that illegal immigration was to blame for the increase in sexual violence and that the patriarchy no longer existed in Italy.
He was addressing the opening of a foundation that Cecchettin’s father had set up in honor of his daughter.
A request for comment on the comments from NBC was not immediately answered by the Italian administration.
Following Cecchettin’s passing, the Italian Senate this year authorized additional laws to combat violence against women, such as more stringent restraining orders and more monitoring of persons convicted of gender-based violence.
Opposition lawmakers and nongovernmental organizations, however, feel that the measures fall short and are calling on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to do more to address gender imbalance and lower the nation’s crime rate against women.
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