“I was 23 years old when I killed my father, and only ten when the

“I was 23 years old when I killed my father, and only ten when the court removed him from our home because he was violent. He didn’t care. He forced my brother and me to tell social workers that we hadn’t seen him for weeks, even though he continued living in that house, which had become a prison. The constant punches to my mother’s face knocked out all her teeth, yet no one noticed anything—not the institutions she had asked for help, not those who were supposed to monitor him. Then, after yet another report, the police took all of us away: my mother to a women’s shelter, us to a community home. And our father? Free. Until he got nine months for abuse—served under house arrest.

They told my mother she could start a new life, that the new house was in a protected place, that my father would never find her. But he paid a municipal employee to reveal where she was, and he forced her to take him back. I spent four years in a community home, forgotten by everyone. Once I had served my sentence, I felt it was right to tell what had happened to me, so that no family would ever have to endure what mine did.

You see, Your Honor, this is why women struggle to report abuse. This is the disgust that, at sixteen, led me to become a skinhead, to tattoo the word revenge on my neck, and to live it every day—until the day I shot my father. He was threatening me, my mother, and my brother with a knife. The judges wrote that I should have left, abandoning them to his madness. Justice, after closing its eyes for years, looked at me and did not see a victim, but a murderer.

In prison I decided to tell my story so it could serve as an example. Today it is a book; later it became a film.

In prison I studied. I managed to change my life, to build myself a future, distancing myself from the violence I had breathed in for years—and from which I was only able to free myself through an extreme and desperate act.

Today I am a cybersecurity expert, known across Europe. But my redemption is owed only to myself, not to the institutions that abandoned me and then, at every opportunity, throw my past back in my face. Believe me: no one embraces hatred voluntarily. Life depends on the context in which you are born, on luck, on that hand you want to cling to when you’re about to fall—and which, too often, no one offers you.” — Luigi Celeste