The famous drummer from Greek rock band Pyx Lax, Giorgos Giannopoulos has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor as the 71-year-old man has already been convicted from a first instance court.
According to an article by “Espresso”, it all started in a resort area of eastern Attica in the fall of 2011. The family of the minor, who had a cottage close to the (then 60 years old) drummer, was there mainly on weekends. The accused, both because of his fame and because he is the father of two adult girls, was considered by the neighbours to be a person above any suspicion.
Neighbuors let their children play outside his house, as he showed them special love and enjoyed their company. The dirt road that connected the few houses was essentially a large yard and the children of the area came and went with relative ease in the houses of the neighbours, knowing their parents, as well as himself. The nightmare was revealed in May 2013, when the mother of the minor realized that something “strange” had happened between the musician and another minor.
It all started when a couple of neighbours forbade their child to go to the 60-year-old’s house, prompting the 8-year-old ‘s mother to investigate if something had happened to her child as well. The little girl, overcoming her initial shame, revealed that “every time she went to his house” he would let them watch children’s videos and clips while he would “grab her pee and poppy, and fondled her”, while sometimes “he grabbed her hand and put it on her private part to caress it” , “while fondling with his hands” her breast.
This nightmare, according to the publication, occurred frequently, leading the shocked parents to contact police days later. There, the little girl was examined by a specialist officer, who tested her cognitive abilities before the minor testified what was happening to her.
“Current research and the literature state that the credibility of a child of this age, when his testimony is obtained methodologically correctly, is similar to that of a minor,” noted the lawyer of the minor’s parents, Panagiotis Papaioannou, in “Espresso”. But the family’s ordeal to seek justice against the “eponymous” neighbour was just beginning.
Despite the thorough prosecutorial recommendation for the referral of the accused, an acquittal was issued in March 2017, which found the evidence for what had been reported to be insufficient. However, the Prosecutor of the Court of Appeals, assessing this committee as inviolable in law and deficient, pointed out his mistakes and filed an appeal, which led to the referral of the musician in August 2017.
In the first instance trial before the Athens Police Department, in April 2019, the accused was found guilty by a majority of 5-2 of seducing a minor who had not reached the age of 12 and was sentenced to 12 years in prison without suspension. The accused, however, appealed and was released, subject to his appearance at the police station of his residence twice a month.
Today, however, the time has come for a second instance trial and the musician’s fate will be decided.
The artist at first instance, according to the publication, invoked the absence of witnesses, while mainly trying to make the child look “crazy”, claiming that she was suffering from depression, manipulative and that “she had seen somewhere else what she was accusing him of doing”.
