Turkish court fines actress second time for 'insulting' sergeant convicted of rape

A Turkish court has sentenced famous actress Ezgi Mola to pay a fine over “insulting” former sergeant Musa Orhan for the second time. A former sergeant, Orhan was convicted on charges of sexually assaulting a Kurdish young woman.

Friday June 14 2024 03:26 pm

Duvar English

A Banaz court has sentenced actress Ezgi Mola to pay a fine for “insulting” Musa Orhan for the second time. Orhan is a former sergeant who was convicted of sexually assaulting a Kurdish young woman who died by suicide.

Mola was previously sentenced to pay a fine of 6,960 liras for using the words “rapist” and “scum” by an Ankara court in 2022.

Orhan’s lawyer opened another lawsuit against Mola, this time over non-pecuniary damages.

Banaz Civil Court of First Instance on June 12 sentenced Mola to pay a total of 10,000 liras, including interest from the date of Mola’s social media posts.

“No matter who it is done to. Tweeting insults and lynching is not constitutional freedom of thought. The presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial are sacred values that we all need, that must be protected and that cannot be used as an excuse for populism. This decision is a precedent,” Orhan’s lawyer Mehmet Erkan Akkuş claimed.

The case dates back to August 2020 when Mola protested Orhan's release by referring to him as a “rapist” and “scum.”

Orhan was arrested on Aug. 19, 2020, following public outrage over 18-year-old Kurdish woman İpek Er's death. In a suicide note she left on July 16, 2020, Er wrote that she had been kidnapped and raped by Orhan for 20 days. She later died by suicide in the hospital in August.

Despite the grave accusations, Orhan was released in less than a week on Aug. 25, 2020, and since then he has stood trial without arrest.

In December 2021, Orhan was sentenced to 10 years in prison.. He was however not jailed during the trial process, which caused another public uproar at the time.