An Italian former police officer who used couchsurfing.com, the host-a-traveler Web site, to allegedly lure young women to his home, where he drugged and assaulted them, was on Tuesday found guilty of raping a 16-year-old Australian and sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison.
Dino Maglio, a former police officer in Padua, was convicted following a fast-track trial, but remains under investigation for three other alleged cases of drugging and assaulting women who stayed in his apartment.
The prosecutor in the case has not yet called for a trial in those cases.
The case raised questions about the safety of couchsurfing.com, which Maglio — who went by the name of Leonardo on his profile — is suspected of using to meet and host young female tourists.
According to witness statements collected by the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), which has investigated allegations against Maglio for a year, many women who say they were drugged and possibly assaulted by Maglio recall feeling comforted by the fact that he was a police officer when they decided to stay with him.
The women recall being toured around by Maglio, who showered them with praise, and then — in a series of eerily similar episodes — would offer them a special wine or tea. Some then recall passing out, but not much more.
After news broke about the allegations, couchsurfing.com said that users’ safety was a top priority and that it was constantly “evolving our tools and processes to find and halt abusers of our system.”
Maglio made a surprise final statement just hours before the guilty verdict, in which he claimed he was innocent and the sexual encounter was consensual, according to journalists at IRPI.
Maglio was ordered to pay 60,000 euros (US$63,622) to the victim in the case, who was a minor at the time of the rape. He was also ordered to pay her mother, who was traveling with the victim at the time, 15,000 euros.
Prosecutors said Maglio had admitted spiking the victim’s drink with a sedative and having intercourse with her. Asked why he had slipped a pill into a glass of Baileys liqueur, he told investigators before the trial: “I am stupid, there was no real reason.”
He also said he believed that the sex was consensual and that she “never said no.”
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