(LifeSiteNews) — A four-year legal battle holding up Steve Bannon’s planned “gladiator academy” in Italy has been resolved.
The Criminal Court of Rome ruled that Benjamin Harnwell did not illegally acquire the leasing rights to a 13th century Carthusian monastery in Trisulti in 2017.
Harnwell currently runs the Rome-based Dignitatis Humanae Institute. He previously worked as a staffer for Nirj Deva, a British Conservative Member of the European Parliament. He has been working to establish the school, which seeks to train future nationalist and populist culture warriors, with financial and moral support from Bannon, a former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Harnwell first drew the ire of Italy’s then-Minister of Culture, socialist Dario Franceschini, after purchasing a 19-year lease for the 800-year-old property, located southeast of Rome, in 2017. Franceschini successfully evicted him in July 2021 despite having zero evidence that the €200,000 (approximately $220,000) that was owed had not been paid.
“How (he) got me out of that monastery without me ever having been convicted of any crime is a question that will have to be asked,” Harnwell told reporter Edward Pentin.
After the ruling, issued last Thursday, Harnwell told The European Conservative that there was a “total lack of due process.”
“Despite your most sinister underhand efforts, we won — you lost. Steve Bannon’s ‘Academy for the Judeo-Christian West’ lives to fight another day,” he remarked. “So suck on that, Italian communists! MAGA triumphant.”
The decision was supposed to be handed down in December but was postponed due to poor preparation by state prosecutors. Bannon and his allies reportedly spent millions on the case, which ultimately upheld four previous rulings issued by a regional civil court.
According to Politico, Italian state attorneys dropped two other charges after the ruling. “They destroyed my reputation with accusations they knew weren’t true even at the time they were making them,” Harnwell told the outlet.
The decision clears the way for the academy to officially relaunch. It is unclear, however, if Harnwell will establish it at the monastery, where between 250 and 300 students can reside, or if he will go elsewhere.