A German woman has been sentenced to serve a longer jail sentence for “hate speech” than a violent gang rapist she “offended” by making “hateful” remarks.
20-year-old Maja R. was found guilty of “hate crimes” after she called a convicted child rapist a “disgraceful rapist pig.”
She was jailed for a weekend after she was found guilty of defaming the man.
The man who was “offended” by the remarks was one of nine migrant attackers who had gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in a Hamburg park four years earlier, according to reports.
The migrant had only been given a suspended sentence and served no time in prison due to his age, the New Zealand Herald reported.
Maja R. reportedly did not know the rapist but was one of at least 140 people who sent him disparaging messages via WhatsApp.
Angry citizens sent the rapist messages after his name and number were leaked on Snapchat.
“Aren’t you ashamed when you look in the mirror?” she wrote, calling him a “disgraceful rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak.”
She also told the child rapist that he “couldn’t go anywhere without getting kicked in the face.”
“Let’s hope you are just locked away,” she added.
Maja R. told the court she sent the message “without thinking twice.”
However, the move was a brave action for a country with notoriously strict censorship and anti-free speech laws.
The pediatric nursing student did, however, apologize to the convicted child rapist.
She told the court that her actions “didn’t help anyone.”
The man — who was not named by the New Zealand Herald — was one of nine rapists convicted of abusing the 15-year-old girl for several hours in September 2020.
Almost all evaded jail time under German juvenile law because they were still teenagers at the time of the attack.
Only one of the rapists, an Iranian national, brazenly accepted responsibility for the rape by telling the court: “What man doesn’t want that?”
Maja R.’s sentence was harsher than the rapist she defamed because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attended the court hearing for the case.
A court spokesperson told local media that Maja R.’s hostility was emblematic of the country’s lingering anger over the rape case, even four years later.
The case had “reached a new, worrying level of intensity,” he said, describing the criticism as “a targeted attack on the rule of law.”
Germany famously has strict “hate speech” laws that criminalize even the mildest of slurs.
Calling someone an “idiot” in Germany can result in a prison sentence of up to two years.
