Italy: ex-priest 'santone' — sexual-violence conviction against sect followers final at Cassation
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Appellate history
2021-02-01
Sexual-violence count final; slavery count remanded.
2021-10-01
Combined 14y8m sentence including slavery; finality unconfirmed.
Record class
Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
ex-priest leading a commune-like healing sect for two decades
Organization
No organization assigned
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
The victims were members of a sect who submitted to the ex-priest's claimed healing and spiritual authority within a closed communal structure.
- Spiritual healing or treatment
- Exorcism or deliverance
- Institutional obedience or isolation
Evidence structure
Proceedings
2021-02-01 · sexual-violence conviction final; further counts retried
Italian courts; Corte di Cassazione (Feb. 2021); Corte d'Assise d'Appello di Firenze (Oct. 2021). Mauro Cioni, an ex-priest who ran a commune-like sect near Cortona for some twenty years as its 'santone', had his 8-year sexual-violence conviction against followers confirmed as final by the Court of Cassation in February 2021. A remanded slavery count led a Florence appellate court in October 2021 to impose a higher combined sentence, whose finality was not confirmed in the sources reviewed.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- claimed healing and exorcistic powers over sect members
- communal isolation
Cited record
Sources
- national newspaper court reporting final appellate disposition 'Il santone di Montecchio: Cassazione conferma la condanna per violenza sessuale', La Nazione (2021).
Reports the Cassation confirmation of the sexual-violence conviction and the remand on the slavery count.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.lanazione.it/ Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: final-appellate-disposition. SHA-256 bf639b1d713b7a3cba5ebc72a661a6dc0f5ef7f410ada14416ace109deba36aa
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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