Are journalists allowed to report on allegations if it is a “statement versus statement” situation? The 3rd Civil Chamber of the Frankfurt Regional Court, chaired by Judge Ina Frost, examined this question in the legal dispute Rammstein-Singer Till Lindemann against the Southgerman newspaper answered. In the justification for the judgment of September 6th in the interim legal protection procedure, which was delivered to the SZ on Tuesday, the chamber states that the “required minimum amount of evidence” can also be present if there is only one for the specific situation witness there. Otherwise “this would mean that a possible incident such as the present one would never be reported,” said the court. In this case this was allowed.
In its article “At the End of the Show” on June 2nd, the SZ reported together with the NDR that several women accused Rammstein singer Till Lindemann of abuse of power and sexual assault and thus described the so-called “casting system” in detail for the first time where young women were regularly recruited for parties and sex with Till Lindemann before and after Rammstein concerts.
While Till Lindemann and his lawyers do not deny this casting system, they argued in their injunction against the SZ that the sexual acts described in the article were consensual and therefore fell within the singer’s privacy, which they saw violated by the SZ’s reporting . In addition, the article is unbalanced. The SZ opposed this.
The Frankfurt Regional Court rejected the injunction request in its entirety and explained why it had nothing wrong with the reporting. The chamber sees an “overwhelming public interest in information” for reporting on the “casting system,” especially “from a prevention perspective.” This also includes the sexual contacts described when “young women are systematically selected for sexual acts with the plaintiff and brought to him in an organized manner” and “in this context, due to their inexperience, they can end up in situations in which sexual acts occur, from which they are no longer able to free themselves due to fear or shame or significant alcohol or drug intoxication,” according to the verdict.
The termination of the investigation against Lindemann does not make the reporting inadmissible
Among other things, the SZ described the case of a young woman who went to an after-show party in a hotel after a concert in Vienna in August 2019. She described that she had become unconscious during the night. When she woke up, Till Lindemann was “lying on top of her” and asked her if he should “stop”. The chamber saw this reporting as certainly raising suspicion of a possible sexual assault.
However, the Chamber believes that the strict standards of permissible suspicion reporting are met in the article contested by Till Lindemann. The SZ not only presented affidavits from the women allegedly affected themselves, but also from other people to whom the women had already told about their experiences before Rammstein even made the headlines in this matter. According to the verdict, the SZ was also able to demonstrate credibly that it “made sufficient efforts to verify the accuracy of the information” before publishing the article. In particular, the SZ also made it credible that the young woman in the hotel after the concert in Vienna in 2019 “may not have been in a position to give effective consent to sexual acts with the plaintiff, which undisputedly took place.”
The article is balanced, Till Lindemann and the band Rammstein also had enough opportunity to comment. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office’s discontinuation of the investigation against Lindemann does not mean that the reporting is inadmissible. The chamber points out that the public prosecutor’s office did not question the two women allegedly affected. In conversation with the LTO portal Lindemann’s lawyer Simon Bergmann has announced that he will appeal.