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Steve Bannon’s man in Italy wins fight over right-wing ‘gladiator school’
Victorious former EU Parliament staffer said the court verdict was a blow against “politically driven” prosecutions elsewhere of Donald Trump-allied figures.
MARCH 7, 2024 2:00 PM CET
BY BEN MUNSTER
ROME — Italian courts have vindicated a scheme, sponsored by key allies of former U.S. President Donald Trump, to set up a “gladiator school” for right-wing wannabe politicians in an ancient monastery in the mountains of central Italy.
Benjamin Harnwell, a former British Conservative European Parliament staffer, rented out the 700-year-old Trisulti charterhouse east of Rome in 2017 with a view to establishing an “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” with his longtime friend Steve Bannon, the hard-right activist and podcaster who played a key role in Trump’s election victory in 2016.
Shortly after moving in, Harnwell was sued by Italy’s top state prosecutor, which alleged that he had fraudulently obtained the lease for the monastery and failed to pay €200,000 in rent.
After five years of grueling lawsuits through civil and criminal courts, Harnwell was exonerated Thursday after a magistrate in a northern Roman courthouse ruled that he had obtained the lease correctly and had paid all funds due, corroborating the verdict of previous rulings in the civil court. The state’s prosecutor, which had automatically picked up the case following allegations made in an investigative TV documentary, also dropped two of its charges.
“Steve Bannon’s Academy for the Judeo-Christian West — the ‘gladiator school’ — lives to fight another day,” a jubilant Harnwell told POLITICO as he left the courtroom, adding that it was a blow against “politically driven” prosecutions elsewhere of Trump-allied figures. “They destroyed my reputation with accusations they knew weren’t true even at the time they were making them.”
The ruling Thursday potentially lays the groundwork for Harnwell reclaiming the monastery after he was pre-emptively evicted in 2021 amid demonstrations from activists from a nearby town against the occupation of a cherished heritage site by individuals linked to the far right.
The proposed academy’s curriculum — a cocktail of libertarianism and conservative Catholicism — had planned to include courses on “Cultural Marxism,” “The Church as an Early Business Enterprise” and Islam, and aimed to provide the world’s future populist politicians and influencers with the rhetorical skills needed to challenge liberal worldviews.
Funded by Bannon and a coterie of unnamed associates in right-wing circles, Harnwell had been the sole applicant to lease the monastery when the government was seeking new buyers in 2016 after the friars who had occupied it for seven centuries began to dwindle and could no longer manage the upkeep.
The verdict was originally due in December but the state’s prosecutor had turned up without having studied the brief and asked for it to be postponed to March.
Meanwhile, the state’s star witness — a lawyer who had publicly denounced Harnwell in an investigative documentary — was absent from each hearing in Rome’s criminal court. That left only two local police officers, one of whom offered testimony that was limited to details gleaned from local media at the time as well as conversations with the mayor of the small town bordering the monastery.
“Anybody who had followed this case from the beginning and had followed it closely knows that no crime had been committed,” said Harnwell. “How [Former Culture Minister Dario Franceschini] got me out of that monastery without me ever having been convicted of any crime is a question that will have to be asked.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/steve-bannon-rome-right-wing-gladiator-school-populist-nationalists/