An iPhone 7, by the way. Expensive.
You’re walking down the street. Some guys run up to you, drag you off somewhere, take your phone, and keep you in some room for eight hours. Then they announce that you’re free to go, but they’re keeping the phone.
That is an exact description of what happened to me on January 28. No joke.
To this day, I still don’t even have the administrative offense report—the main document that is supposed to justify my detention. No court date has been set. My lawyer files a motion: hello, on what grounds did you take the phone? Give it back.
There has been no clear answer.
We went to court, and something astonishing came out: the police had submitted documents about my detention. They state that “Navalny’s phone and SIM card were seized as evidence.” But where they are is unclear. They are not in the case file.
The Tverskoy District Court in Moscow is generally known for accepting any police scribble without so much as glancing at the law. But even they sent the case back, writing: “the seized phone and SIM card are missing from the case materials; we cannot accept it.”
So the court has effectively established for me that my lovely iPhone 7 was simply stolen and spirited away somewhere. I assume they took it to Putin, and he is now performing some kind of shamanic ritual with it—dancing around it with a tambourine to absorb its power and someday finally say my last name.
That’s all very nice, of course, but Putin has plenty of money—he can buy himself a phone.
So today I filed a theft report. No documents, no report, no court hearing, no phone in the case materials. What else is that? They really did just steal the phone.
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