In May, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair published a profile of Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, with a long history of antisemitic comments, in which the U.N. “independent expert” admitted that although she trained as a lawyer, she never passed the bar and is not a lawyer.
Experts told JNS that they had “serious ethical concerns,” since Albanese has often referred to herself as a lawyer in her biographies and said she was an attorney in her Nov. 23, 2021, application to become a U.N. rapporteur.
At some point between May 31 and June 11, Vanity Fair removed the phrase “I’m not a lawyer” from Albanese’s statement that “I didn’t take the exam to become a lawyer, because I’m not a lawyer, and I never wanted to do it,” per archived versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, an initiative of the nonprofit Internet Archive.
Albanese’s office told JNS on May 30 that she “is not an attorney” but a “legal and academic researcher.” The office referred JNS to Albanese’s academic credentials. JNS asked Albanese’s office if it disputed the translation of her answers to the Vanity Fair interviewer.
JNS repeatedly sought comment from Vanity Fair, including from Silvia Bombino, the author of the article, and several top editors.
In a May 28 social-media post in Italian, Bombino stated that Albanese was the first to accuse Israel of “genocide,” per an English translation of the post. Bombino said that her interview subject has “been doing an incredible job for years.”
“Thank you for everything you do,” she wrote to Albanese.
Eitan Fischberger, a researcher, posted on social media about Vanity Fair removing the quote from Albanese. He told JNS that he posted about the edit on June 11, when he went to archive the original interview link “on the assumption that they would try to stealth-edit it.”
“The other day, a colleague told me he was reading Francesca Albanese’s Vanity Fair interview, and it didn’t say what we said it did—about her finally admitting she’s not a lawyer,” stated Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, on June 11. “Turns out, she got Vanity Fair to change her words. What a scoundrel.”
