“The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA, for its acronym in Spanish) celebrates the ruling of the Tucumán Courts that establishes that journalist Irene Benito was being unfairly criminalized. The ruling of the criminal judge Alicia Freidenberg dismisses the complaint filed by Alfredo Falú, a lawyer and public official who had been investigated by Benito and the media outlet where she works, La Gaceta, in connection with a series of cases of alleged judicial corruption.
The journalist and her counsel Patricio García Pinto had insisted several times since the beginning of the process (November 2020) that, based on a slanderous and false accusation, there were attempts to manipulate justice to perpetrate revenge for the exercise of freedoms of the press and of expression.
The sentence disrupts a process that FOPEA followed closely due to the unusual virulence of the attack in which judges and prosecutors criticized by the journalist, including the complainant, intervened.”
