Following a post on X, a journalist, Giulia Cortese, has been found guilty of defaming Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

In a Wednesday ruling, Ms Cortese was slammed with 5,000 euros as damages or about $5,500, including court costs. 

The journalist was also issued a suspension fine of 1,200 euros ($1,300) for her two posts against Ms Meloni. 

In one of the posts, Ms Cortese was said to have described Ms Meloni by using “not nice words.” 

She also aimed at Ms Meloni’s height by suggesting that the prime minister was 1.2 meters or about 4 feet tall, her lawyer, David Olivetti, told the court. 

The prosecutor in the case had called Ms Cortese’s action as an example of body shaming. 

On Thursday, Ms Cortese said that the past years had been “quite stressful” for her, even as her social media accounts were targeted by supporters of the prime minister, sending her insults and threats. 

The case against Ms Cortese is only the latest in the series of defamation lawsuits brought by the prime minister against dissenting voices. 

In 2023, a court in Rome ordered an author, Robert Saviano, to pay 1,000 euros (about $1,100) and court costs for his criticism of Ms Meloni during a TV programme in which he used a slur to refer to her for her hard-line stance on illegal immigration. 

The court ruled that slut overstepped the right of criticism even though Mr Saviano has the right to appeal the judgement. 

Several organisations that monitored press freedom have also voiced their concerns about the lawsuits in Italy. 

One of them is Reporters Without Borders, which demoted Italy five places to 46th in its World Press Freedom Index this year, considerably lower than Germany (10) or France (21).

In its review of Italy, the organisation wrote that “for the most part, Italian journalists enjoy a climate of freedom” but that they can give in to self-censorship “to avoid a defamation suit or other form of legal action.”