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But in 2017, the appeals court in Ancona overturned the conviction, after the female judges agreed with the defendants’ argument that the victim looked “too masculine” after seeing a photo of her. The judges wrote that it was “not possible to exclude the possibility that it was” the alleged victim who organized the evening at which she says she was drugged and raped. The judges noted that one man “didn’t even like the girl, to the point of having stored her number in his phone under the nickname ‘Viking,’ an allusion to an anything but feminine figure, rather a masculine one.”

The victim was not present at the appeals court hearing because she had returned to her native Peru.

The victim’s lawyer, however, called the judges’ reasoning “disgusting,” and filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. She noted the victim had suffered such genital trauma in the rape that she required stitches

“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,” Cinzia Molinaro, the woman’s lawyer, told the Guardian. “They also wrote that a photograph [of the woman] reflected this.”

The case will now be reheard by a court in Perugia, a city about 80 miles away from Ancona.

The case brings to question the treatment of rape victims in Italy. Molinaro said her client moved back to Peru because of the how the community in Ancona reacted when she came forward against the two men.