The trial in the Sassari Court of Appeal, which begins tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., in which Ciro Grillo and three of his Genoese friends are accused of gang-raping an Italian-Norwegian student, 19 years old at the time, in July 2019 in Porto Cervo, Italy, at the Grillo family's villa, is at risk of being immediately postponed.
The four young men, now 25 years old—in addition to Beppe Grillo's son, Vittorio Lauria, Edoardo Capitta, and Francesco Corsiglia—were all sentenced in the first instance court of Tempio Pausania in September 2025: eight years in prison for the first three and six years and six months for Corsiglia, the latter found guilty only of sexual assault, but not gang rape (during the trial he said he went to sleep that night after having sex with the girl).
The defense team—comprising Alessandro Vaccaro, Enrico Grillo, Andrea Vernazza, Ernesto Monteverde, Mariano Mameli, and Antonella Cuccureddu—has filed a total of five appeal documents, totaling approximately one thousand pages. Among these, the primary issue is the missing signature on the first-instance ruling by one of the three judges on the panel, Magistrate Alessandro Cossu, now transferred to Asti. All three members of the panel were drafters. Therefore, the lack of a signature could invalidate the over 72-page ruling. The defendants' lawyers have filed an appeal, along with a series of objections and requests for annulment, which will be addressed at the opening of the trial tomorrow.
Giulia Bongiorno, the civil plaintiff's lawyer representing the student, Ciro Grillo and his friends' main accuser, is also expected in court. The girl has always maintained that she was raped in the house in Cala di Volpe, on the Costa Smeralda, after a night out at a nightclub in Porto Cervo. Vinicio Nardo and Fiammetta Di Stefano are representing the civil plaintiff for the other girl involved, who was the student's best friend at the time. The young woman was inside the house at the time of the alleged rape, sleeping on a couch, when the four men took sexually explicit photos of her without her knowledge. Four defendants will also be charged with this in the appeal.
