Actors behind the defamation campaign

This section outlines the main actors involved in the sustained defamation campaign against Prof. Carla Rossi, a philologist and manuscript scholar whose academic work has been cited and reviewed for over three decades by leading experts in Europe and beyond. A full dossier, including documentation, screenshots, and verified communications, is publicly available at:

1. The International Society for the History of Miniature Painting (SISM – Naples)

Between 2022 and 2023, the name and infrastructure of the Society were used to disseminate defamatory emails, including one dated 1 April 2023 sent to all members via its internal mailing list. The message was crafted to appear as if issued by the Society’s president, yet no clarification or formal denial was ever circulated. When formally requested to prove it had filed a cybercrime report, the Society failed to produce any documentation, despite private assurances to Prof. Rossi that such action would be taken.

📎 Related materials and email headers: www.receptio.eu/diffamazione

2. A former faculty member of the University of Zurich

A retired academic affiliated with the Society exploited mailing lists and internal contacts to disseminate defamatory messages, often using misleading sender identities. These operations, which occurred without institutional authorisation, targeted Prof. Rossi and her collaborators. Full evidence, including legal analyses and email records, is referenced in the legal proceedings currently underway.

📧 Extracts and forensic metadata available in the public archive.

3. Peter Kidd

Peter Kidd is a British manuscript consultant and blogger, formerly employed on a temporary basis as a cataloguer at the British Library. He currently operates without any institutional affiliation. Through his blog and frequent collaborations with auction houses and private collectors, he has promoted and described numerous leaves excised from dismembered Books of Hours, Psalters, and other medieval codices. His writings often disregard the ethical dimensions of manuscript dismemberment, focusing instead on the commercial traceability and resale value of individual folios.

In a now-archived online statement, Kidd openly declared that the dismemberment of illuminated codices is "perfectly legal"—a position that, while legally contestable in many jurisdictions, reveals a troubling alignment with the antiquarian market and an indifference to the cultural damage inflicted.

Since December 2022, Kidd has used his blog as a platform for a sustained campaign of defamatory content directed at Prof. Carla Rossi, a scholar internationally recognised for her work on the digital reconstruction of dismembered manuscripts and her principled stance against the trade in detached leaves. His first attacks followed within days of Prof. Rossi’s public appeal, which denounced the online sale of illuminated folios and coincided with her formal report to the Carabinieri’s Art Crimes Unit in Italy.

To date, Kidd has published more than twenty targeted blog posts maligning Prof. Rossi, her research centre (RECEPTIO), her academic collaborators, and even her legal representative. This orchestrated defamation has had severe and well-documented consequences:

Fake obituaries falsely announcing Prof. Rossi’s death were published online.
Anonymous threats—including death threats—were sent by email to Prof. Rossi and her colleagues.
Defamatory emails were disseminated via mailing lists associated with academic societies, in breach of data protection regulations.
Journalists were approached and supplied with misleading or demonstrably false material, which resulted in the publication of smear articles.

In his blog posts, Kidd repeatedly denies Prof. Rossi’s academic qualifications, casts doubt on the legitimacy of her institutions, and insinuates scientific misconduct without any substantiated evidence. These actions are not legitimate critique: they constitute reputational sabotage, sustained over time, and grounded in personal grievance.

It is also of material relevance that Peter Kidd has personally authored descriptions and commercial listings for several manuscript leaves that Prof. Rossi has since reconstructed in her scholarly publications—work that challenges the very dismemberments he helped legitimise. The conflict of interest is clear, and the retaliatory dimension of his campaign against Prof. Rossi cannot be overlooked.

The facts are verifiable, the consequences measurable, and the implications for academic freedom and heritage protection deeply concerning.

📸 Archival screenshot and commentary: www.receptio.eu/diffamazione

https://www.oprom.eu/who-is-peter-kidd

https://www.isfida.eu/who-is-peter-kidd

4. Other individuals involved in the defamatory campaign

The ReceptioGate affair exposed the coordinated participation of individuals from both academic and media circles. These include:

Peter Burger (journalist), who publicly repeated unverified claims;
Sanne Wellen, involved in earlier online disparagement;
Marina Bernasconi, associated with actions aimed at discrediting RECEPTIO;
Lisa Fagin Davis (Fragmentarium), who publicly questioned the integrity of the centre’s reconstruction work;
The anonymous Twitter account @WhiteKnightti was actively used to circulate defamatory and harassing content targeting Prof. Rossi throughout 2023. The account was abruptly deleted shortly after legal proceedings were initiated before the Civil Court of Rome. Despite its apparent anonymity, technical analysis allowed the identification of the IP address linked to the individual operating the account. The digital traces and deleted posts have been preserved and are part of the evidentiary material submitted to the competent authorities.
Several contributors to Fragmentarium and affiliated media outlets who echoed false narratives without verification.

Each of these names is documented through public statements, tweets, email evidence or published material, all archived or recorded prior to deletion.

5. Threats, Forgeries, and Digital Harassment

The campaign extended well beyond academic disagreement. Between late 2022 and mid-2023, Prof. Rossi and several colleagues received death threats, anonymous hate mail, and digital harassment. False obituaries in her name were published on Swiss platforms. These actions were reported to legal authorities and remain part of the official record.

🕯️ Documented examples and legal filings are available via the links above.

Related Academic and Institutional Sources

ISFiDa – Academic blog with official posts
https://www.isfida.eu/blog
OProM – Institutional communications
https://www.oprom.eu/news
Alta Formazione – Articles on manuscript protection
https://www.alta-formazione.it/blog
Substack – Documentation archive
https://oprom.substack.com
Zenodo – ACMD: Archive of Dismembered Manuscripts
https://zenodo.org/record/10714613
Cambridge Scholars – Biblioclasm and Reconstruction Series
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-9355-9

Institutional Complicity:
1. the Case of the Società Internazionale di Storia della Miniatura

Institutional Complicity and Legal Responsibility

The ReceptioGate Affair has exposed not only individual misconduct, but also the institutional complicity of certain academic societies. Among them, the Società Internazionale di Storia della Miniatura (Naples) played an active and documentable role in the orchestration and dissemination of defamatory content targeting a scholar whose research has challenged the manuscript dismemberment market.

Between December 2022 and April 2023, at least four defamatory emails were circulated using the Society’s official mailing list. Yet the president of the association, Prof. Alessandra Perriccioli Saggese—despite being repeatedly informed—took no legal or disciplinary measures to contain the damage. She failed to denounce the abuse of the mailing list, did not safeguard the personal data of members as required under EU Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR), and allowed further defamatory messages to circulate using the same system.

This qualifies not as mere negligence, but as complicity in aggravated defamation under both Italian and EU legal frameworks. These messages were circulated using the association’s official contact list, in clear violation of data protection norms and institutional neutrality. Far from being a one-time breach, this conduct was enabled by a persistent lack of oversight and by the continued failure to protect member data.

Despite being repeatedly informed, the society’s president took no concrete action. She failed to denounce the abuse, to protect the privacy of members, or to distance the institution from the defamatory content. By allowing the association’s internal tools to be used for reputational aggression—on more than one occasion—she effectively became complicit in the campaign.

Such conduct raises serious legal concerns, particularly in relation to:
– complicity in defamation (for knowingly facilitating repeated acts without intervening);
– data protection violations (for the unsecured distribution of members’ contact information);
– institutional liability (for allowing association resources to be used in bad faith).

The legal and ethical implications of this behaviour are addressed in Jordi Puig’s article:

📄 Institutional Complicity in the So-Called ReceptioGate Affair: 1. The Role of the Società Internazionale di Storia della Miniatura – Napoli
https://www.academia.edu/129268162/Institutional_Complicity_in_the_So_Called_ReceptioGate_Affair_1_The_Role_of_the_Societ%C3%A0_Internazionale_di_Storia_della_Miniatura_Napoli

Further documentation is provided in Puig’s open-access book:
📘 The ReceptioGate Affair: Truth, Defamation, and the Struggle Against Manuscript Dismemberment
https://books.google.ch/books?id=ek5ZEQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v=onepage&q&f=false

Academic societies have a duty to remain above commercial and defamatory dynamics. When they instead provide a platform for slander—either through negligence or connivance—they forfeit their legitimacy as scholarly institutions.

The University of Zurich

During the escalation of the ReceptioGate campaign, the University of Zurich — where Prof. Carla Rossi held a Titularprofessur — did not remain neutral.
Instead of defending its own scholar against defamatory attacks originating from anonymous blogs and unverified online content, the university issued statements to the press that publicly undermined her, without any internal investigation or academic due process.

These actions were not only institutionally inappropriate — they were dangerous.
Shortly after those statements were published, Prof. Rossi became the target of physical threats: strangers appeared at her home, and she received obscene materials in her mailbox.
This occurred after her home address, including a photo of her front door and mailbox, was published online.

The university’s failure was not one of omission, but of complicity through public exposure, despite being fully aware of the risks to her safety and academic integrity.

In light of this conduct, Prof. Rossi has definitively severed all ties with the University of Zurich and does not intend to re-establish any form of relationship with an institution that has demonstrated such disregard for truth, justice, and the basic duty to protect its own researchers.

There is no academic freedom where a university chooses institutional self-preservation over truth and human dignity.

The Role of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

One of the most troubling aspects of the ReceptioGate affair is the position taken by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF/FNS) — a public body that should uphold transparency, academic rigour, and the ethical use of research funding.

Instead, the SNSF has chosen to defend and promote a publicly funded digital project of questionable scientific value: Fragmentarium, which advertises as “fragments” numerous leaves that have recently been excised from complete manuscripts — in full complicity with the antiquarian market. Prof. Carla Rossi publicly denounced this practice, denouncing it as an institutional form of biblioclasm dressed as research.

Rather than addressing these serious concerns, the SNSF responded with absurd accusations.

They claimed, without basis, that Rossi had used “copyrighted terminology” — such as “Annunciation” or “Deposition” — in describing the miniatures, as if common art-historical terms were the property of a single manuscript dealer. Even more baselessly, they accused her of “self-plagiarism”, simply for citing a passage from her own previously published scholarly work.

A legal case against the SNSF is now ongoing in Switzerland.
Prof. Rossi has taken formal legal action to defend her academic rights and to expose the institutional complicity that has enabled this campaign of defamation, distortion, and ethical failure.

Research ethics cannot coexist with the protection of a market that profits from cultural dismemberment — nor with institutions that criminalise those who denounce it.

📌 Related source:
🔗 https://www.oprom.eu/fns

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