The verdict in the appeal trial of the so-called Lunghi case, named after former Mudam director Enrico Lunghi, was handed down on Wednesday afternoon.
The judges acquitted former journalists Marc Thoma and Sophie Schram and upheld the first-instance acquittal of the former director of RTL, Alain Berwick.
The events go back to the autumn of 2016, almost ten years ago. Sophie Schram had conducted an interview with Enrico Lunghi, during which he pushed her microphone away and grabbed her wrist.
The scene was broadcast 11 days later in a report in which Schram appeared with a bandage on her arm. In the wake of the broadcast, Lunghi faced disciplinary proceedings and stepped down from his post. For close to a decade, the question has been whether the report painted a misleading picture of him. The broadcast had cut 28 seconds of footage and did not mention that Lunghi had subsequently apologised to the journalist.
