Two women convicted of aggravated defamation for writing Punkstoo: Teemu Bergman to pay 15 000 euros in damages
The Court of Appeal considered the allegations made in the summer of 2021 to be false.
The charge concerned a post on an Instagram account called Punkstoo, which published anonymous accounts of sexual harassment and violence in punk circles in the summer of 2021. The caption was “sexual harassment/harassment, rape, violence”, and among other things it told how the author had been attacked by a person called T.
According to the court judgment, one of the women was the author of the text and the other was the founder of the Punkstoo account, which published the text on the account.
Bergman said he identified himself from the publication. According to him, the allegations made in it were false.
“There is no basis for truthfulness”
The Pirkanmaa District Court dismissed women’s charges in November 2023, as Bergman was not generally recognizable by the text.
The Court of Appeal saw it differently.
The Court of Appeal considered that even though Bergman was not named in the text, numerous people following punk music were recognized by him. According to the court, women did not present the grounds for the support of the claims, so they had to be arrested as false.
The Court of Appeal notes that the themes raised in the writing were socially significant and Bergman’s publicity.
– This had not entitled the respondents to publicly make a claim of the lawyer for a serious sexual offense whose truthfulness has no grounds, the Court of Appeal announcement states.
Compensation for suffering and loss of earnings
Women were sentenced to a penalty of 80 daily fines, one of which will be paid EUR 2,000 and the other over EUR 1,500. In addition, they were ordered to pay Bergman a total of EUR 15,000 for suffering and loss of earnings.
– The Court of Appeal considered it to be clarified that the decline in income related to the music and band activities of the lawyer was partly due to the publication in question. The decrease in income had also been influenced by other publications of the Punkstoo Account and the coronavanic situation, the release states.