How to Pathologize a Prosecutor

Raffaella Di Marzio and diagnosis in the service of a guru’s defence

Luigi Corvaglia

I have written about Raffaella Di Marzio before. On that occasion, I challenged her failure to understand the criminological concepts she so confidently wielded as blunt instruments against anyone who dared to call abusive spiritual groups “cults.” Now, I have no wish to pile on, but I cannot help noticing that the scholar has put herself on the line once again, this time displaying an ability to make psychological diagnoses remotely, without seeing the subject, without assessing any documentation and, no minor detail, without being licensed to do so.

Although she does not practise clinically, has never been a psychotherapist and was registered with the professional register of psychologists for only three years, she is no stranger to reckless forays into psychological interpretation, generally in defence of pseudoscientific doctrines. She did so, for example, when discussing the bandit Salvatore Giuliano in an article extolling Oleg Maltsev’s method. Maltsev is a Ukrainian pseudo-academic who ended up behind bars.

This time, however, she has gone too far. Salvatore Giuliano would hardly have been in a position to complain about Di Marzio’s analysis and, in any case, he was an outlaw. This time, by contrast, the scholar has seen fit to adorn a respected, living Argentine prosecutor—with whom she has had precisely as much personal contact as she had with Giuliano, namely none—with the descriptions of a person lacking empathy, emotionally cold (in other words, practically a psychopath), obsessed with exercising his authority, possessed of an exaggerated sense of omnipotence and suffering from a loss of contact with reality.

Not content with paying him these compliments, the author calls for the prosecutor to undergo an assessment of his physical and mental condition and, at the very least, to be suspended from office. The prosecutor is Fernando Arrigo, who is leading the prosecution in the Argentine proceedings against Konstantin Rudnev, a guru previously convicted in Russia of sexual and drug offences and currently facing charges in Argentina of aggravated human trafficking and other serious offences.

The venue for this weighty assessment is the magazine Bitter Winter. The fact that this eminent scholar has presumed to insult a prosecutor so brazenly while he is carrying out his duties relieves me of any scruples that might otherwise have restrained my impulse to offer equally unflattering assessments of her conduct in this affair.

Publicly portraying a prosecutor before an international audience as mentally disturbed, without substantiating the claim, is already a very serious matter. To reserve this treatment for the prosecutor pursuing the very person who enjoys the tender attentions of the campaign for his exoneration in which one is participating is shameful. The enormous mobilisation on Rudnev’s behalf involves controversial organisations and is littered with questionable claims, admittedly, but this episode nevertheless marks its lowest point.

If I were to venture a diagnosis of Dr Di Marzio based solely on what I have read about her, I would certainly find some intriguing material. But I would rightly be reprimanded by the professional body—with which I am registered—for breaching the code of ethics.

In conclusion, if the stream of invective directed at Arrigo is intended as the outcome of a professional assessment, the necessary grounds to support it have not been presented. If, instead, the insults are intended as polemical metaphors, invoking the authority of psychology serves to lend them a clinical credibility that the information presented does not justify.

The fact that the beneficiary of this portrayal of a prosecutor as someone who is not in full possession of his mental faculties is precisely the spiritual leader on whose behalf her own network is going to such extraordinary lengths raises more than a few doubts about the motives behind so ill-judged an intervention, pursued with such meagre means. One gets the impression that whoever is advising Dr Di Marzio does not have her best interests at heart.