Because he insulted Tessa Ganserer, Member of the Green Party, and two other women, a blogger has to pay 24,000 euros. The Nuremberg-Fürth district court sentenced the man to 120 daily rates of 200 euros each.
The man, who runs an Internet platform with around 100,000 followers, had made derogatory comments about the appearance of Ganserer and two other women in a photo. On the net he called them, among other things, “laughing numbers” and commented that they could be “put on a dropper box as a warning”.
In a first trial, the district court in Hersbruck, Central Franconia, sentenced the defendant to 40 daily rates of 80 euros each. Both he and the public prosecutor appealed the verdict. The latter assessed the fine of a total of 3200 euros as too low. In the new proceedings this has now been increased at the regional court. In a half-hour verdict, the judge stated, according to a court spokesman, that the statements of the blogger and entrepreneur had degraded women to objects, aimed at personal matters and pilloried people. The right to express one’s opinion exists, but has its limits, he emphasized, and the sense of honor had been violated here.
The politician Ganserer was happy about the verdict on Wednesday. “We humans are not all the same, but we are all the same in dignity. In this respect, the judgment is a clear victory for decent manners and also for our democratic society.” Ganserer has been a member of the Greens in the Bavarian state parliament since 2013. In November 2018, she publicly came out as transsexual. “Humiliation and trans-hostility are not opinions,” she said, “they are clear insults to people who are no longer covered by freedom of expression.”
She reported the blogger after being made aware of the comment last year. The fact that she is defending herself against such hostility happens “with sad regularity,” she said on Wednesday, often reaching them on social media or by e-mail. They consistently report this, but the authors are often not identifiable.
After the verdict, the blogger is considered to have a criminal record. Among other things, he had relied on freedom of expression and stated that it was a question of a politician who had to put up with more than a person without political office. The man can appeal against the judgment. Then the proceedings would be reopened before the Bavarian Supreme Court.