Actress and activist Pia Zammit has filed an appeal on the libel case she lost against it-Torca over a photo of her wearing a costume with Nazi symbols taken backstage of a play.

Zammit had sued the newspaper for libel in 2019, saying that a report published by them had suggested that she was a Nazi sympathiser.

The paper had published pictures of her in a parody Nazi uniform costume; pictures which were taken backstage at a performance of the famous World War Two comedy Allo, Allo!. The newspaper suggested that the actress had made light of Nazi symbolism, publishing comments by an anonymous ‘educator’ who said that Zammit’s image had been offensive to the victims of Nazism.

Read more: MEIA, major cultural figures blast ‘dangerous’ libel judgement against Pia Zammit

Zammit’s lawyer Joseph Zammit Maempel had argued that the same newspaper had reviewed the play during its 2009 run. However Magistrate Rachel Montebello disagreed, upholding the arguments made by lawyer Aaron Mifsud Bonnici, for the GWU-owned newspaper.

Mifsud Bonnici had told the court that “a photo of a well-known person wearing a swastika is a controversial action and insisted that expressing disagreement with such actions is a fundamental human right”.

“The controversy is not that she sympathises with Nazism but the use of it in comedy. Silly things about matters of great importance are insensitive,” Mifsud Bonnici argued.

In an appeal against the judgment filed this morning, Zammit is insisting that the court failed to understand the “subtle false logic” on which the newspaper editor based his judgement. She said the court had to call this “perversion” for what it was.

Read more: TMID Editorial: Pia Zammit libel – The Theatre of the Absurd

“The right to freedom of expression does not include the right to twist the truth, pull facts out of their context, and use these facts as a weapon with which to hit out at Zammit. Justice dictates that the truth must be recognised and confirmed and perversion and absurdity side-lined… otherwise the scope behind having a libel law is lost,” the appeal reads.

Zammit said that nowhere in the articles did the Torċa editor indicate that she was an actor and that the photo was taken backstage of a comedy play that was based on Nazi-era France.

She insisted the photo was maliciously taken out of context to allow people who did not know her to conclude that she had Nazi sympathies – something she vehemently denied and said went contrary to her activism in favour of the rule of law and democracy.