Top comment about Erin Tanti
The comment here was sent in by Steff Bannister, and I agree completely. That’s how I see it, too. I said at the outset that Erin Tanti is clearly one of those people who are the main star in a film in their own minds, who script things and instead of living, watch themselves performing.
And yes, he was posed on that rock while the helicopter was flying overhead – whatever the naysayers bleat.
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That man is living in a little world of his own and sees himself as a character in a story. I would go as far as say that he is not at all afraid of the consequences he is now facing. The more complicated they are, the more entertaining ‘his’ story will become and the more occupied his mind will be.
It’s a bit like playing a video game and thinking you have become the little character shooting monsters, rather than the human being in front of a screen.
I know some people like that, who enjoy making problems worse just to have more knots to untie and sub-plots to get through. But there is no room for these people outside mental institutions as their consequences could devastate lives.
It’s as if this young man has nothing to lose. His life ‘outside’ his sick mind is a boring life that he doesn’t want to inhabit.
Given a choice between being locked up in prison, facing charges which include sex with a minor, assisted suicide and murder, all in the gripping context of Dingli Cliffs at 4 am with the good-looking, under-aged daughter of a top businessman who is in the news, or living the normal life his peers live, i.e. working as a teacher from 9 to 3, going to your mother’s place for tea and biscuits, playing a bit of sudoku, watching some telly, checking Facebook, watching a movie, once a week having a drink or eating a pizza, and going to bed, to wake up to go to school again, he would definitely opt for the first. Anytime. That’s what he wanted.
The most excited person in the law courts during this trial will be the guy in police custody.
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If he ever ends up in the Correctional Facility, he’s going to find life their pretty boring too. How long can someone live off a fantasy?
The Labour movement’s 65-year fascist fantasy shows no sign of abating.
He can try his hand at writing an autobiography.
Now that would be ‘interesting’ and might reveal some more sinister truths.
Yes, his struggle.
Jozef, wasn’t Adolf also a failed artist?
Amen.
Indeed.
As I was watching him on the news yesterday – with all the cameras and lights flashing around the car he was in – the same thoughts struck me. He’s got all the publicity and attention he’s probably dreamed his entire life of having. It seemed like some sordid celebrity fantasy.
Well, he got it, only for some very sick and twisted reasons.
I dearly hope justice will be served. He stole Miss Zahra’s entire future; he doesn’t deserve one of his own, or at least not the one he planned on having.
He got the Lee Harvey Oswald version of attention though.
That is not a very high grade version of attention, even if that I personally think that Lee Oswald was innocent.
Bull’s eye Daphne. They want to be the main star in a film, play, or article. Did I just write that? I meant short story.
In some other countries someone like him will not last long in the general prison population. Somehow a lot of hardened inmates find crimes against minors abhorrent and make these perpetrators pay in their own way. That’s why such individuals are often placed in solitary confinement – an even more boring alternative.
They’d get tossed around from cell to cell like a bucket of sodden rags only to end up on segregation for their own protection.
How do they treat nonces in Malta?
It depends on who they know
They give them an amnesty when Labour comes to power.
Having analysed all the evidence which will be brought forward to their attention and evaluated the arguments presented to them by the lawyers representing the two parties it will be the jury who will decide whether Mr.Tanti should be found guilty or not.
Until then you and anyone else who may choose to prosecute and subsequently judge Mr.Tanti would be making a very grave mistake. At this delicate point in time you would do well if you were to refrain from running similar comments. As you may have noted in the past I have always enjoyed reading your comments. Not this time though Daphne.
[Daphne – Feel free. I am completely immune to the bullying of the immoral police who wish to silence me for pointing out that a teacher who takes his pupil to Dingli Cliffs at night with a bottle of whisky and a load of pills should be jailed only for that – let alone when she is found dead. You may think that sort of thing is all right. I most certainly do not. Forgive me for saying this, but you must be truly depraved if you think it is all right for teachers to have sex with their pupils and put those pupils in situations where they wind up dead at the foot of a cliff.]
Check out “Secret History” by Donna Tartt
I think people are judging Mr Tanti without having heard all the evidence. The people we can judge now are those who gave him his teaching job and entrusted him with minors.
I agree that “we are judging him without having heard all the evidence”.
I’m sure that when we have heard all the evidence, we will all be howling for his blood.
I think a clear picture is slowly emerging on that greasy young man that goes by the name of Erin Tanti.
Those who gave him his job gave him accessibility but fudging the line was completely his own doing.
Whatever the girl might have done or felt, he was the adult and in a position of trust.
One decides whether to take advantage of a minor/situation according to one’s principles.
We will see which tale will be spun in court and whether lessons will be learned and steps taken to reduce abuse of pupils.
No, Mr Bonnici, the only person we should be judging is Erin Tanti.
When will this country face the reality that when something goes wrong it is our fault and no one else’s?
There is unequivocal evidence that this teacher drove his pupil to Dingli cliffs at night, that she is dead, and that he is not.
There is also reliable evidence that this teacher had bought a large amount of painkillers and had a bottle of whisky in his car.
It is also amply evident from the footage of his rescue and of the short time he spent in hospital, that this teacher did not fall off a cliff.
His pupil is dead. She was with him when she died.
Those are facts, not judgement.
How can you excuse his behaviour? Really, are you going to stoop so low as to pin the blame on whoever employed him?
Surely they could not have know that this man fantasised about screwing minors. How could they have known?
If they do not know the people they employ to run their business, then they do not know much. I wouldn’t trust them with my dog, let alone my kids.
It’s 2014 not 1950 – before they’d go to the village priest to find out who so and so was – now a quick internet check loads all the info you need to know about the people you need to screen.
The fact that he was at Dingli Cliffs at 4:00am with a 15-year old pupil of his is enough ‘facts’ for me.
Oh, come on! Judging him without having heard all the evidence! The fact remains that this poor excuse for a man was a teacher in the company of one of his 15-year-old pupils, at 4am at Dingli Cliffs, when she had already been reported missing by her family, and she ended up dead. Aren’t those facts enough for you, or do you imagine there is some kind of scenario in which those facts might be justifiable in his regard?
“without having heard all the evidence”.
All the evidence will never be heard. The other person who could could have given evidence is dead. Now he’s free to invent whatever he wants.
I have my own theory.
Erin Tanti is stunted – and he has compensated for his conspicuous lack of physical stature by growing an ego that grated with everyone who knows him.
Make no mistake, Tanti was not popular in theatre circles and I know too many actors who wouldn’t work with him because he is an arrogant twat at best.
But nobody saw this coming. The analysis above makes total sense.
In his ego driven mind he is the protagonist in a psychological thriller and my guess is that the sheer enormity of his actions hasn’t hit him yet because he’s got the ability in his mind to comfort himself.
Give him a year or two….
Spot on, A Montebello. I used to do a bit of acting in Malta and whenever I was told Erin Tanti might be in a play I was in, I pulled out. I couldn’t stand him.
He had the most startling delusions of grandeur and he turned really vicious and nasty when faced with criticism or objection.
If his own pitiful excuse for “theatre” bombed (as it always did) it was always someone else’s fault: the critics, because they just didn’t “get” his genius; other members of the theatre community, because they weren’t as imaginative or radical or avant garde as he was; the audience, even, because they needed a better education (I’m paraphrasing his own words here).
And he couldn’t understand why people didn’t adore him. He thought he was God’s answer to theatre, and some great artiste and intellectual (hysterical) and it clearly really bothered him that women his age were so uninterested in such a stunted specimen. He was referred to as “the leprechaun” in theatre circles, but there was no gold at the end of his rainbow.
He’d claimed he was gay for a while, and then bisexual, but everyone knew he was just trysexual – as in he’d “try” anyone willing to give him the attention he craved.
I hope he gets a lot of that special attention in prison. He’ll wish he’d really jumped off that cliff. It’ll be more than a “broken hip” he gets in there.
His lack of insight is astounding – and scary. His sort usually do themselves in when the world they create for themselves, in which they are the main protagonists, suddenly collapses and they start facing the stark naked truth.
Apparently defence counsel seems to be aware of the fact that teacher will be in harm`s way if he resides at the Correctional Facility, hence the request for sojourn at the Mount Carmel Hospital.