Mother of murder victim awarded €500k compensation over online posts

Statue of justice.
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A writer who published passages from the private diary of the mother of a murder victim has been ordered to pay her €500,000 in compensation.

The district court in Haarlem said Wim Dankbaar had failed to comply with earlier court orders to remove statements about Maaike Terpstra from his website and Facebook page.

Terpstra’s daughter, Marianne Vaatstra, was raped and killed near her home in Friesland in 1999. In 2012 a local farmer, Jasper S., was arrested and confessed to the killing after a mass DNA sampling in the area.

Dankbaar was earlier ordered to pulp all copies of his 2014 book, The Forbidden Diary of Maaike Vaatstra, in which he claimed that fabricated evidence was used to convict an innocent man of the murder.

A court decided he had violated the authorial rights of Ms Terpstra (formerly Vaatstra) by including extracts from her diary, which had been passed to him by a mutual acquaintance. She was also awarded €200,000 compensation.

 

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