Hundreds of protesters have been gathering outside of an appeals in court in Italy after it was recently revealed that two men were cleared of rape charges in a case partly because judges considered the victim to be “too masculine” to be sexually assaulted, The Guardian reports.

The backlash comes years after the controversial ruling was handed down in 2017. The reasoning behind the ruling didn’t come to light until it was rejected by the country’s highest court on Friday and ordered for a retrial, according to the newspaper.

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The ruling stems from a case involving a 22-year-old Peruvian woman, whose name has not been released, who says she was sexually assaulted by two men in 2015.

Cinzia Molinaro, a lawyer representing the woman, told The Guardian that two men spiked her client's drink with drugs after the group went to a bar following an evening class and later raped her.

After the incident, physicians reportedly discovered a high level of benzodiazepines in the women’s blood and said injuries she sustained were consistent with her claims of rape.

Though the two men were convicted for raping the woman they were later acquitted by a court of appeals in Ancona, Italy.

At the time, the judges on the court, all of whom were reportedly female, questioned the credibility of the woman’s account given her appearance, as they considered her unappealing and said she resembled a man, according to The Guardian.

The judges had reportedly drawn their conclusions from a picture of the victim after the defendants claimed to have no attraction to her. One of the defendants also reportedly registered the number of the victim in his phone under the label “Viking.”

“I read this sentence in 2017 and that’s why we referred it to the supreme court,” Molinaro told The Guardian.

“It was disgusting to read; the judges expressed various reasons for deciding to acquit them, but one was because the [defendants] said they didn’t even like her, because she was ugly. They also wrote that a photograph [of the woman] reflected this,” she continued.

Molinaro said her client moved back to Peru following the ruling after being shunned in the Italian city because she reported the men.

The case will reportedly be scheduled for a rehearing by another court in Perugia.