The Orchestration of a flagrant crime or the crime of an orchestrated flagrant abuse? Manager Sandu Tudor’s journey through the meanders of public stigmatisation

Our research focus on a unique episode in the biography of the journalist, poet and Christian thinker Sandu Tudor. I have explored the multiple damages he suffered, both during the blackmail process initiated by the businessman Ion Tatos, manager of the Central Import and Export Cooperatives, against Credința, the newspaper under Sandu Tudor’s management, and after this controversial event. A critical analysis of the reception of Sandu Tudor's activity, especially in the press, proves, unfortunately, the preservation of the deconstructive and destructive potential, the director of Credința newspaper being carried to this day through the meanders of public stigmatisation. Not a few are the confusions crept into the reconstruction of this far-reaching scandal, which shook the publishing arena of interwar Romania from the fourth decade, most of the time the blackmail process being indistinguishable from the slander process filed by several prominent members of the “Criterion” Association (Mircea Vulcănescu, Alexandru Christian Tell, Petru Comarnescu, Gabriel Negreanu) against the same daily newspaper – Credința Faith. The resources of our work corroborated the information provided by primary sources - volume 2 of file 013495, Criminal fund, from the CNSAS Archive, file 160/1935, fund “Documents of some personalities. The press. 1880-1948”, from the Central National Historical Archives (CNHA) - with those from the memorial literature and, respectively, from the articles published on account of the sensational subject of a crime that polarised the interwar journalistic world into antagonistic parties.