I am glad to see that the Leader of the Opposition has spoken out at last about the thousands – yes, literally thousands – of text messages with which Franco Debono bombarded him during his campaign, when he was prime minister, to be given attention/made a minister, failing which he would bring down the government.
It’s a damned shame the public was not given this information earlier. It would have allowed more people to frame this individual in the proper context of what appears to be some kind of deep neurosis. But perhaps Lawrence Gonzi felt it would not be appropriate to reveal either the nature or the extent of his backbencher’s irrational onslaught at the time.
This means that far too many people took Debono at face value, saying that “he has some good ideas” and “maybe he’s right”, when the reality is that what they should have been looking at was his psychology. The fact is that sending thousands of unsolicited text messages to anyone, at all hours of the day and night, constitutes harassment and is grounds for a police report and prosecution. When an ex boyfriend, ex husband or ex lover does this to a woman, she can have a restraining order slapped on him. Of course, the then prime minister was not in a position to report his backbencher to the police or have him prosecuted even if he had wanted to, but anybody else would have done so under that level of harassment.
I had some idea of what was happening, including the shocking nature of a few of the text messages which raised doubt about Debono’s frame of mind and personality. Other journalists did, too, but you cannot repeat what you are told off the record and in confidence (not by the then prime minister himself, I hasten to add). Debono had tried something similar with me – not texting me, because he knew that, not being in the same position as his fellow politicians, I would have had absolutely no compunction about publishing his text messages on my website.
So instead he used to ring me, hovering over my blog and my newspaper columns and hitting my number every time he saw his name mentioned. At first I had patience and listened – or rather, I let the phone rest on the table while I went off to make a cup of tea and let him rant oblivious to the lack of “yes”, “indeed”, and “I see” feedback. Then when he did it once too often and flipped my switch, I began hitting the red button every time the name ‘Franco Debono’ flashed up. He soon got the message and never rang again.
That’s how you have to treat men like him, but it’s women who know this best because men are not generally at the receiving end of harassment from other men so they don’t really know how to handle it. I suppose it must come as a shock to them to learn first-hand what so many women have to put up with. It’s true that when you cut them off and don’t take their calls they escalate matters to the next level – in my case, Debono went on to launch a vicious attack on me in Parliament, using his parliamentary immunity from prosecution, just like that other man with a similar problem, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. But escalation of the onslaught when they feel they have been blocked out and their honour has been impugned is no reason not to put your foot down. You have to put your foot down and rough it out.
The worst thing you can do with men like Franco Debono is to treat them like ordinary people or as somebody having a temporary episode and who will soon revert to normal. It is pointless and self-defeating to be polite because they don’t understand politeness and interpret it as weakness and an invitation to further escalating rudeness, aggression, hostility and bullying.
This is why Debono accosted Simon Busuttil – because he knows for a fact that Busuttil would never release a volley of absolutely cutting remarks that take him apart in front of others. Strangely enough, even though I too am the sort who is more likely to leave the scene rather than engage in public battle with somebody who accosts me, Debono is probably not sure how and in what way to insult me in public, or what my reaction will be, so when he sees me in Valletta he tends to pull out his magic phone and pretend to be involved in deep conversation until I am safely past and clear of him.
The mayor of Zurrieq learned about this state of affairs to his cost when he engaged Debono as his defence lawyer in the case The Police vs Ignatius Farrugia, in which I, as the person Farrugia harassed in the street, am the main witness and ‘victim’. At the appointed hour for the hearing last week, Debono was called away on ‘urgent business’ and his junior lawyer took up the brief instead.
You’d imagine that he would have relished the opportunity to interrogate me in court, to be oh-so-clever and sarcastic and amusing, but no, not at all. He was present in another courtroom when I gave Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando the rollicking from hell, from the witness stand, and is probably concerned I might try something similar with him. Don’t worry, Franco, I promise not to crack any naughty jokes in front of the magistrate about your tuna toast, your cock and your Big Pony, however much it would liven up proceedings.
I wonder, though, who this dedicated phone-pest is ringing and messaging now. Is it the Prime Minister? Is it Mrs Prime Minister? Or is it – given what he told the press recently about having met him on constitutional reform – the President of the Republic? Be sure that they won’t be telling him to go to hell, either. Like Lawrence Gonzi before them, they probably think that they can’t afford to do so. But unlike Lawrence Gonzi, they seem to think that there’s nothing really wrong with Debono at all. After all, he did vote for them.
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