Shame on Italy: Marion True’s Case Ends with a Whimper

I used to worry about how long it was taking. But the more it lasts, the more will be the shame.

So said Paolo Ferri, then Italy’s prosecutor in the Marion True antiquities trafficking trial, during our chat in Athens two and a half years ago. Ferri was right, but not in the sense that he intended.

What’s shameful is making the Getty Museum’s former antiquities curator twist slowly in legal purgatory for five years, only to drop the case because the statute of limitations had run. The guilty party here is the Italian government: If it had a case for its criminal charges, it should have proven it. It’s a strange judicial system that allows this senseless scenario to drag on for so long with no final act.

This unceremonious dropping of charges (reported while I was away in China) unleashed a vitriolic tirade from True against her former employer, the J. Paul Getty Museum, where her acquisitions as antiquities curator got her into Italian hot water.

In an interview on the New Yorker‘s website, True said this to reporter Hugh Eakin about the Getty:

I have nothing but the greatest contempt for them in the world. They acted like I ran the place. Above me I had a chief curator who was deputy director, a director, an in-house counsel, a president, a board of trustees to whom the president reported, and a chairman of the board. What about the lawyers who drafted the acquisition policy, who were supposed to be vetting all documents?They were perfectly happy to assure all that [the alleged acquisition of illegal art] was my work. Never once have [former Getty director] John Walsh or [his successor] Deborah Gribbon stepped forward to say one word about their responsibility.

I had once tried to ask Walsh about his role in overseeing True’s controversial acquisitions, to which he replied, “That’s a long story” and walked away.

Meanwhile, in published comments about the long overdue end of True’s trials, Max Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum, and Francesco Isolabella, True’s lawyer, have said, respectively, that Marion had “sacrificed herself” and that she was a “sacrificial victim.” Four years ago, when it wasn’t fashionable to show sympathy for her plight, I had coined the epithet, “sacrifical curator,” to describe her role in taking the heat for the antiquities-collecting museum profession, which had engaged in True-like practices.

So what does the Getty now have to say about all this? Here is its official statement:

We are pleased charges against Marion True have been dismissed and we
wish her the very best as this long and difficult ordeal comes to a
close.

The fallout from the Getty’s controversial antiquities acquisitions continues: “Around the start of the New Year,” according to a spokesperson, this famous piece from its holdings has a one-way ticket to Italy:

“Statue of a Goddess,” probably Aphrodite, Greek, South Italy, 425-400 B.C.

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