One of our favourite stories of the past year…
On Thursday afternoon, a judge finally brought an end to the strange case of Filippo Bernardini, the Italian man who pleaded guilty earlier this year to impersonating hundreds of people in the book-publishing industry in order to steal unpublished manuscripts. While the government argued that Bernardini should spend a year in prison, Judge Colleen McMahon didn’t agree. Her verdict: no jail time.
If one theme held the proceedings on Thursday together, it was the enduring mystery of the crime. As the prosecution, the defense, and the judge all noted, Bernardini never sold these manuscripts, nor profited off of them in any way. Not even Bernardini seemed able to fully explain exactly why he had dedicated years of his life to such a bizarre caper, and everyone admitted they had never dealt with a case like this before. “I have no idea what to do with this case, and I’ve thought about it a lot,” Judge McMahon said. “I don’t expect to see anything like this ever again.”
In a letter to the court, Bernardini offered his first explanation for his crime. His defense began simply and sympathetically: “I have always loved books.” He had grown up in a small town, and says that reading offered a way to feel like he was somewhere else — a way to create his own world. Bernardini said “the warmth and excitement” that came with opening a new book as a teenager felt “euphoric,” and that he had long been obsessed with getting his hands on new books, a desire he had previously described in a pseudonymous teenage novel. “I could not get enough of it,” he wrote.
Bernardini described his scheme as a sort of impulsive whim that got carried away. He was stuck in the lower rungs of the publishing world, watching others share book manuscripts above him, and wanted a piece of the action. He says the first fake email address he created was for someone he knew of in the publishing world. “When that request was successful, from that moment on, this behaviour became an obsession, a compulsive behaviour,” he wrote in his letter to the court. He was fueled, he wrote, by a “burning desire” to feel that he was a publishing professional, and when he couldn’t achieve a more stable position, he “started cosplaying” as though he had. “Every time an author sent me the manuscript I would feel like I was still part of the industry,” Bernardini said.
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Several of Bernardini’s victims wrote letters to the court arguing against his incarceration, including the novelist Jesse Ball, whom Bernardini had impersonated. Ball argued that, in a certain way, he appreciated Bernardini’s caper. “The difficulties of my manuscripts being stolen were none,”
Ball wrote. “On the other hand, the benefit of having it stolen was that I suddenly felt once again I lived in a community, a place where things matter because there is memory, attendant eyes fastening on to things that happen. For once a person cared deeply about something — what matter that he was an interloper?” Ball lamented “the soul-crushing boredom of run-of-the-mill publishing correspondence” and the fact that the industry “has become more and more corporate and cookie-cutter.” He was glad to know the book world was still capable of a little mystery. “We must be grateful when something human enters the picture,” Ball wrote. “When the publishing industry for once becomes something worth writing about.”
Read more at Vulture
https://www.vulture.com/2023/03/book-thief-filippo-bernardini-gets-no-jail-time-deported.html
