Bizarre: the case against Marco Borsato has been prepared for four years, but just before the hearing, 500 hours of tapped conversations surfaced. “I don’t want to screw Marco any further,” he says.
It’s hard to imagine: the case against Marco Borsato has been prepared for no less than four years, but it was only just before this week’s hearing that five hundred hours (!) of tapped telephone conversations from complainant A. and her mother Nathalie T. were thrown on the table by the Public Prosecution Service. Marco’s team hasn’t had time to look into this.
An hour and a half
It is unusual for a victim to be tapped by the police, but apparently there were doubts about her story. According to the Public Prosecution Service, there is ‘nothing relevant’ in those conversations, so the police did not elaborate on the tapped conversations in writing. Marco’s defense did receive a transcript of one conversation last Thursday.
Marco’s lawyer Carry Knoops: “Assuming a forty-hour working week, it would take about twelve weeks to listen to those 500 hours of audio fragments. The written version of one transcription that we ultimately received is a tap of one and a half hours. My colleague will demonstrate that this has achieved significant results.”
Sewing Marco
Colleague Geert-Jan Knoops then reveals in court what can be read in that transcript. “In the tap of January 12, 2023, to which my colleague just referred, we read from the mother’s mouth, in a tapped conversation with daughter, not being aware of course that she was being tapped, literally: ‘I didn’t want to screw Marco any further than has already been done.’”
Sew Marco? That sounds as if mother Nathalie, who led Marco’s fan club for years, wants to take revenge. “It’s really there. And then the police want to insist that these taps are not relevant to this case?”
500 hours
If the court leans towards a conviction, Carry wants the case to be stayed so that the 500 hours of conversations can be studied. “If that one tap of an hour and a half of conversation has already yielded something significant, what about those 500 hours minus an hour and a half?”
Heleen Rutgers, chief prosecutor of the Central Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, acknowledges the carelessness. She chimes in RTL Tonight: “There are endless conversations, which have been found to be irrelevant to the proof of this fact. They should have been added. That is really a mistake. That is absolutely a mistake. We should have done that.”
Not relevant
That mistake was also admitted to Marco’s team, according to Heleen. “We found out about two weeks ago that that part had not been added to the file. We immediately contacted the defense and said: ‘This is an error by the Public Prosecution Service, I immediately acknowledge that.’”
However, according to Heleen, those conversations do not change anything. “It means that the defense did not have the chance to listen to it, but the police assessed those conversations as not relevant.”