Reporter Must Pay $5K for Mocking PM's Height

For the record, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is somewhere around 5-foot-3, notes the BBC. She is not, as an Italian journalist jokingly suggested on social media, 4 feet tall. And now the journalist has been ordered by an Italian court to pay 5,000 euro, or about $5,500, for the offense, reports Reuters. It "seems absurd to clog up Italian courts, which have to deal with far more serious things, with such nonsense," said the journalist, Giulia Cortese.

The friction between the two goes back to 2021, when Cortese reposted what turned out to be a doctored image of Meloni with a framed photo of Mussolini behind her on a bookshelf. Cortese says she deleted the post when she learned the image was bogus, but Meloni publicly called her out about it. "You don't scare me, Giorgia Meloni," Cortese wrote on social media, as translated by the BBC. "After all, you're only 1.2 meters (4 feet) tall. I can't even see you."

Meloni sued for defamation, and the court this week ruled that the joke amounted to "body shaming." Cortese also received a suspended fine of $1,300 for the offending tweet and another in which she described Meloni in "not nice words," according to Meloni's lawyer. The New York Times notes that Italian defamation law does not distinguish between public and private figures, and Meloni has used it previously. Last year, a court fined author Roberto Saviano $1,100 for using a slur to describe Meloni when discussing her immigration policy. (More Giorgia Meloni stories.)