Today Lignadi apologizes for the rapes of three minors and one adult

Sixteen months after his pre-trial detention for acts of sexual violence, o Dimitris Lignadis will be summoned today by the president of the Mixed Jury Court to oppose his allegations to the charges against him for serial rape against minors.

The former artistic director of the National Theater will stand before the judges who will judge him and, for the first time since he was brought before Justice, he will take a public stand against the accusations against him, which concern four rapes allegedly performed in 2010, 2015 and 2018.

After a long, exhausting and high-pitched process, which came to the hearing of the MOD on the 11th of last February, today marks the beginning of the process towards the issuance of the verdict of the three judges and the four jurors.

With his apology, which is expected to be long, Dimitris Lignadis will try to convince the judges that the complainants are lying. He has also filed lawsuits for false testimony against three of the men who came to court and testified what they claimed to the authorities. The fourth man who reported him to the case investigator did not appear in court, with the result that the judges deprived him of his right to appear as a political plaintiff.

“I declare that I deny all accusations” The artist had said in his first statement in court, after reading the indictment accusing him of raping three teenage boys and a young man: “I have never been with a minor” is his firm response to the accusations.

According to the admissions of the referring council of the Council of Criminal Procedure, which unanimously ruled that the 57-year-old prominent actor should be tried, Dimitris Lignadis for a number of years had developed a specific method to approach his minor victims “building trust and dependence ». The judges of the Council, adopting a fully similar prosecutor’s proposal, formed the view that the prominent artist approached boys who were in a “financially and socially vulnerable position”, such as children of immigrants without strong family protection and care, “taking advantage of his social, professional and economic position “to entice them.

Dimitris Lignadis himself from the first moment he appeared before the interrogator – who, a few hours after he had rushed to GADA to declare that he was putting himself at the disposal of the authorities, issued an arrest warrant against him – denied everything. He said that the allegations made against him at the culmination of the Greek meToo in the field of theater and sports do not have the slightest nugget of truth.

According to the then head of the National Theater, he is the victim of a conspiracy which emerged in his professional field and took on political dimensions, since it was the choice of the government to take over, in September 2019, the management of the leading institution for the promotion of theatrical art.

The accused will also claim before the judges today that after being targeted for specific political reasons, he undertook the Association of Greek Actors to “run” the attack against him, through allegations of disparaging accusations. “It is a successive ignition, because there is an” open call “run by the Actors’ Association” he had told the investigator to explain the pile of complaints made during that time.

He will also claim that he was targeted by individuals and groups with specific personal and political characteristics. Thus, apart from the envy for his successful, as he claims, course, the artist claims that time has actually begun to count down. “Because they carried out two emblematic actions for me. The naming of a hall of the National Theater with the name “Eleni Papadaki” -a renowned actress who was executed in December 1944- and the abolition of the “Experimental Stage”, which was oriented towards Decomposition and Modernism, and in its place, the establishment of a Research Stage for Ancient Drama. I was not forgiven for my love for my homeland, for history and for the fact that last summer in the play “Persians” -which I had directed in Epidaurus and which was broadcast live worldwide- I bowed and kissed the model of the Parthenon . That’s why I was bullied by the leftist media “.

Throughout the trial but also during the investigation process, the artist through his lawyer questions not only the motives but also the personality of the complainants, trying to display their characteristics which, according to the defense strategy, deprive them of the “special weight”. in what they accuse him of. From the beginning of the case, when expressions such as “professional homosexuals” were heard, the defense of the actor and theatrical director has insisted on this effort, in order to create the feeling that the complainants are personalities who can be “manipulated”, aiming at to deal a blow to their complaints. “They are visitors,” two close friends of the accused told the court about the alleged victims.

The judges, who have heard what shockingly described the alleged victims in the middle of a heavy load and crying many times, they will probably want to hear the opinion of the eminent defendant about the people who brought him before them and the reasons why, according to his own version, they agreed to enter into this confrontation being more socially vulnerable and less financially sound than he himself.

Today’s trial is scheduled to take place in the smallest courtroom of the MOD, which means that seats for parties, agents, journalists and the public will be limited. However, it is not out of the question to look for a larger room before the procedure begins or to move it along the way, as has been done several times in the past.

The whole process is expected to take many hours and the court intends to complete the apology today, which means that the hearing, except for the unexpected, will end in the afternoon.

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