The celebrated Czech writer Milan Kundera has a collection of short stories titled “Laughable Loves.” Almost every page of that book is steeped in a wistful Czech humor about people who turn into fools, yet remain convinced that this is what love looks like. Sociology tells us that not so many people ever experience the particular feeling toward another person that gets called love. What sociology doesn’t tell us, though, is how many of those who once loved were capable of turning the object of that love’s life into hell. In short — while poets sing love’s praises, especially in spring, when everything capable of blossoming does, the legal system is often left dealing with the fallout of this inexplicable phenomenon. It seems love conquers all — and our firm’s lawyers are no exception to being drawn into its aftermath.
A Love Story
Viktoria — a striking, tall blonde with steel-blue eyes. Long legs. Chestnut hair. She could have walked a runway. Instead, Viktoria chose to trade a modeling career for the unhurried realm of routine public service. No, this wasn’t paradise, nor some divine calling — it was the Job Center. Viktoria would tap her long, slender fingers across her keyboard, surveying job seekers with her pale, northern eyes touched by a Slavic haze, deciding who didn’t qualify on health grounds. And her life might have gone on flowing steadily and powerfully, like Norway’s river Glomma, had a rapid not appeared on that river. One day — at first wonderful, later cursed — an unemployed man named Thomas showed up in front of Viktoria.
Thomas was stocky. A snake coiled behind his ear, and along his arm ran threads of rivers carrying blue-green ships toward unknown harbors. The arboretum and the fleet had both been acquired at a tattoo parlor in Kreuzberg. And any harbor for those ships, or desert for those snakes, was wherever his hand pointed, or whatever pillow his ear happened to rest on. A thick gold hoop earring and a pair of green Nikes rounded out the picture of Thomas — though he sometimes changed shoes and allowed himself to step out for a beer without the earring.
When Thomas laid eyes on Viktoria, the ships on his arm seemed to stir, and the snake behind his ear appeared to blink and flick its tongue. Thomas no longer wanted a job — he wanted Viktoria. At first, Viktoria wasn’t sure how much she liked the young man, but something about him struck a chord, and before she knew it, she had agreed to coffee. Coffee became a regular thing, and before long Thomas had moved in with Viktoria. Their relationship developed for a while, but eventually Viktoria began to feel more and more like she was being treated as property — and someone’s property, with her steel-blue eyes and Slavic haze, she could never be. The relationship began to grate on her. Thomas was told to pack up and finally find his hands — those flotillas — some actual work. For some reason, he didn’t care for that suggestion. After a heated blow-up, Thomas stormed out, slamming the door behind him. That is how we came to meet Viktoria.
“Please Come In for Questioning!”
As it turned out from the criminal case file requested by our firm’s lawyers, after being turned away, Thomas hadn’t gone home — he had gone straight to the police, where he reported Viktoria, claiming she was the mastermind behind a scheme to defraud the state by abusing her position at work. The state, in the shape of the police, sprang into action instantly on this tip. A request landed at Viktoria’s workplace from the public prosecutor’s office asking for a character assessment of her as an employee, while Viktoria herself received a summons to give a statement in the case (Vorladung als Beschuldigter), in which she appeared as a suspect in aiding fraud. The primary suspect was Viktoria’s father, against whom a criminal case had also been opened under the same provision of the German Criminal Code — §263 StGB. It was with these decidedly unromantic consequences of love that Viktoria came to our law firm.
Given his specialization in criminal law, our lawyer explained to Viktoria that being suspected of aiding and abetting an offense carried the same potential liability as if Viktoria herself were the “primary” defendant in the case.
Note: a lawyer is obligated to explain the legal risks to a person suspected of an offense — including the anticipated range of penalties, the prospects of success, the defense strategy, rules of conduct, and so on.
Having listened carefully to her lawyer and understood that, without help, she would simply become a “punching bag,” Viktoria made the only sensible decision: to seek proper defense of her interests in the criminal case against her.
A Theory: A Parental Rift at the Root of the Criminal Story
As it turned out, this story was like a matryoshka doll — one love story concealing another. Viktoria’s mother’s relationship with her father had broken down, and that rift turned out to be the root of the entire criminal plot.
Viktoria’s mother owns an apartment in Berlin and a house on the outskirts. She herself lives closer to nature, renting out two rooms of the apartment to tenants and a third room to her husband, from whom she had separated six months before the events described here. Viktoria’s father, unemployed and without income, received a state benefit of two hundred euros a month toward the rent of that room. After Thomas’s report, the police showed up at the apartment to conduct a search. The protagonist of this criminal drama wasn’t home. His belongings were in the room, along with a few letters on the desk. His flatmates said they hadn’t seen him in a while, then corrected themselves, saying he did come to sleep there, just not every night. On the strength of that statement, the police felt duty-bound to pay a visit to the address in the countryside as well.
In his report to the police, Thomas laid out the following version of events: that Viktoria’s father actually lived with his wife at the country house, and that the room in the apartment was rented to him only on paper, purely to secure money from the state. The mastermind behind this fraud scheme, he claimed, was Viktoria, who, given her profession, knew how to fill out all the paperwork.
As it happened, the police didn’t find Viktoria’s father at the country house either — though his belongings were there too.
An investigation began. Viktoria’s father was charged under §263 StGB — fraud; Viktoria was also charged, under §§263 StGB (Betrug) and 27 StGB (Beihilfe) — aiding fraud. In theory, these provisions carry significant sentences: up to five years’ imprisonment or a fine under §263 StGB, and a fine under §27 StGB. Yet Viktoria’s guilt was anything but obvious — and even her father’s situation didn’t allow for a clear-cut conclusion either.
Silence Is Golden!
Our firm’s lawyers set about a thorough review of the case file. In the meantime, Viktoria was advised to exercise her legal right to refuse to give a statement where the case concerns a relative — meaning she had a lawful right not to testify against herself or her father.
Viktoria’s father, in turn, also declined to give a statement on the same legal grounds and sought help from a lawyer, who explained that, indeed, over the previous two months, Viktoria’s father had mostly been staying with his wife because he had had surgery and needed care from another person. Documents from the clinic were attached to the lawyer’s letter. Regardless of what the other parties to the case did, our lawyer’s task was to get the case against our client closed.
Nothing in the case file we obtained and reviewed suggested that, even assuming fraud had taken place at all, Viktoria had had anything to do with it. She worked in a different district and could not possibly have influenced any decision on granting the benefit. Every form filled out to obtain the benefit bore the handwriting of her father and mother — a fact a handwriting analysis would have confirmed. In the end, all the prosecutor’s office had against Viktoria was her profession and suspicion that she had used her professional knowledge for fraudulent ends, based on nothing more than a spurned lover’s “tip.” But justice cannot be built on bare assertions.
Outcome: Case Closed for Lack of Sufficient Grounds
After our lawyer laid out every argument demonstrating the weakness of the investigation and the prosecutor’s suspicions against Viktoria — in particular, the absence of any clear evidence in the form of witness testimony or physical traces, such as Viktoria’s handwriting on the benefit-office forms — the prosecutor’s office had no choice but to discontinue the case against Viktoria for lack of sufficient grounds under §170(2) StPO.
Conclusion
The natural next chapter of this story would have been filing a report against Thomas for knowingly making a false accusation. But Viktoria decided not to drag this love story out any further — one that, thanks to professional legal help, ended without any excess drama…
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