A German woman was handed down a harsher sentence than a convicted rapist after she called him a “disgraceful rapist pig.”
Maja R, 20, was jailed for a weekend after she was found guilty of defaming the man, who was one of nine attackers who had gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in a Hamburg park four years earlier, according to reports.
The man had only been given a suspended sentence and served no time in prison due to his age, the New Zealand Herald reported.
Maja R. reportedly did not know the rapist, but was one of at least 140 people who sent him disparaging messages via WhatsApp, after his name and number were leaked on Snapchat.
“Aren’t you ashamed when you look in the mirror?” she wrote, calling him a “disgraceful rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak”.
She also told the criminal that he “couldn’t go anywhere without getting kicked in the face” and said, “Let’s hope you are just locked away.”
Maja R. told the court she sent the message “without thinking twice” — a brave action for a country with notoriously strict defamation laws.
The pediatric nursing student did, however, apologize to the rapist, telling the court “it didn’t help anyone.”
The man — who was not named by the New Zealand Herald — was one of nine teenage boys convicted of abusing the 15-year-old girl for a number of hours in September 2020.
Almost all evaded jail time because of German juvenile law, except for one Iranian national who brazenly accepted responsibility for the rape by telling the court: “What man doesn’t want that?”
Maja R.’s sentence was harsher than the rapist she defamed because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attended the court hearing for the case.
A court spokesperson told local media that Maja R.’s hostility was emblematic of the country’s lingering anger over the rape case, even four years later.
The case had “reached a new, worrying level of intensity,” he said, describing the criticism as “a targeted attack on the rule of law.”
Germany famously has strict defamation laws that criminalize even the mildest of slurs.
Calling someone an “idiot” in Germany can result in a prison sentence of up to two years.
