Suicide of Polish MP’s son prompts backlash against state media that helped identify him as abuse victim

The suicide of the 15-year-old son of an opposition MP has sparked an outpouring of grief but also anger towards the ruling party and media associated with it, whose reporting helped publicly identify the boy as the victim of sexual abuse.

On Friday evening, Magdalena Filiks, an MP from Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s largest opposition party, announced on social media that her son, Mikołaj, had died on 17 February.

After revealing the details of the funeral, she added: “On behalf of myself and my daughters, Aleksandra and Maja, I ask the ‘media’ to respect the privacy of my family and not come.”

Shortly afterwards, a journalist, Radosław Gruca, tweeted to say he hoped the tragedy of Mikołaj’s death would lead to “Tomasz Duklanowski, who revealed that the MP’s son was harmed by a paedophile, disappearing from public life forever”.

Duklanowski is a reporter at Radio Szczecin, a local branch of state broadcaster Polskie Radio. In December, Duklanowski reported on the case of an official in Szczecin who had the previous year been jailed for sexually abusing and providing drugs to minors.

In his report, Duklanowski noted that the two victims were the children of a member of parliament from Szczecin and he provided their ages. That led to widespread criticism that he had effectively identified the children as publicly available information made it easy to work out who they were.

However, figures from the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party instead focused on the fact that, despite the abuse having taken place in 2020 and the perpetrator being convicted in 2021, the case had never been reported until Duklanowski uncovered it.

They argued that this was because the PO wanted to hide the fact that the abuser was a member of and former election candidate for the party and had worked as an official under the authority of the marshal of West Pomerania province, who is also from PO.

“The very people who shout so loudly about the fight against paedophilia are hiding that there are paedophiles in their ranks,” PiS education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, told state TVP, another state broadcaster. He said it was “to the detriment of society” that the case had not been reported.

However, a wide range of experts and commentators noted that the case had not been publicised to protect the child victims, not PO.

Tomasz Terlikowski, a prominent Catholic commentator, accused Czarnek of “participating in the renewed rape of this child” by joining “a witchhunt against the parents of a child who was sexually abused”. That prompted Czarnek to threaten to sue Terlikowski unless he retracted the accusation.

Since Mikołaj’s death was announced on Friday, many such commentators and opposition figures have argued that this tragic outcome was precisely why they had raised concern about state media, which are used as a mouthpiece by PiS, publicising the case and effectively identifying the victims.

Terlikowski expressed his “shock and rage” at the “suffering of a child who first experienced the horrific harm of sexual abuse and was secondarily victimised for the sake of dirty, cynical politics”. He called for those at public media responsible for this to be fired.

Donald Tusk, the leader of PO, tweeted yesterday that “we will hold PiS to account for every villainy, for all human harm and tragedies they have caused while in power”.

Another opposition leader, Szymon Hołownia of Poland 2050 (Polska 2050) wrote: “There are no words today that could bring solace. However, there will come – let no one doubt it – a time of reckoning for those whose words bring death.”

Another opposition MP, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus of The Left, announced today that she would submit a notification to prosecutors accusing TVP and Radio Szczecin of criminal activity in their reporting of the case.

Prosecutors in Szczecin had earlier confirmed to news website Wirtualna Polska that they are already investigating Mikołaj’s death. However, they neither confirmed nor denied media reports that were doing so under article 151 of the criminal code, which punishes those who “incite or assist suicide”.

However, on 23 February – after Mikołaj’s death but before it had been publicly announced – the head of public media’s news agency, TAI, argued that TVP’s reporting on the case had been justified and acceptable. He noted, for example, that they had not given the name of the MP whose children were victims.

One right-wing commentator, Rafał Ziemkiewicz, accused opposition politicians of themselves cynically exploiting Mikołaj’s death as a way to attack the ruling party.

Meanwhile, internet users noted that some figures associated with the ruling camp had, after Mikołaj’s death was announced on Friday, been deleting their social media posts from December and January when they had been commenting on the issue.

Main image credit: Krzysztof Hadrian / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.