Verified Season 1
“This is a story about women who fight back,” the host and investigative reporter Natasha Del Toro says in the first few minutes of Verified , signaling to listeners that vindication is coming. In 2013, Dino Maglio, an Italian police officer living near Venice, used the website CouchSurfing to attract female guests to his home; he is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting many of them. (Maglio was convicted in 2015 of raping a minor and in 2019 of serial rape—though he’s since appealed the latter conviction.) Over the next seven years, several of these women enlisted the help of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy, or IRPI, to bring charges against Maglio. The show illuminates the complexities of surviving assault: how one woman can remember everything and another might have foggier recollections, how some women take action immediately while others can’t or never will. Verified also examines CouchSurfing’s blind spots, takes a detour into how IRPI formed, and culminates with Maglio’s brazen behavior in court and bizarre sentencing. The show models several paths to finding justice or closure, much of which relies upon simply being believed, if only by other survivors.
Storyline
“This is a story about women who fight back,” the host and investigative reporter Natasha Del Toro says in the first few minutes of Verified, signaling to listeners that vindication is coming. In 2013, Dino Maglio, an Italian police officer living near Venice, used the website CouchSurfing to attract female guests to his home; he is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting many of them. (Maglio was convicted in 2015 of raping a minor and in 2019 of serial rape—though he’s since appealed the latter conviction.) Over the next seven years, several of these women enlisted the help of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy, or IRPI, to bring charges against Maglio. The show illuminates the complexities of surviving assault: how one woman can remember everything and another might have foggier recollections, how some women take action immediately while others can’t or never will. Verified also examines CouchSurfing’s blind spots, takes a detour into how IRPI formed, and culminates with Maglio’s brazen behavior in court and bizarre sentencing. The show models several paths to finding justice or closure, much of which relies upon simply being believed, if only by other survivors.
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