Turkish journalist Fatma Sibel Gürcihan has been indicted under Turkey’s disinformation law over a social media post that revived an unverified claim that Berat Albayrak, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s former finance minister and the husband of his daughter Esra, was beaten after his 2020 fall from power.
Gürcihan, who was arrested on July 1, is charged with “publicly disseminating misleading information,” a criminal offense punishable by one to three years in prison.
The indictment concerns a June 29 post in which she responded to a video clip from an interview with Albayrak, who had defended being called “damat,” a Turkish word often used in politics to refer to his marriage into Erdoğan’s family.
Gürcihan wrote that Albayrak had been “dragged into the garden of the villa in Kısıklı and beaten,” referring to the İstanbul neighborhood where Erdoğan has a residence and which Turkish politics associates with his family and inner circle.
She also claimed that a police officer assigned to protect Albayrak had been kicked and punched.
“What kind of ‘cause’ is this, exactly?” she wrote. “Do you have to be strangled like Damat İbrahim Pasha before you accept that you have been cast out by the family?”
The reference was to Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha, an Ottoman grand vizier from the 18th century who had married into the palace family and was killed in 1730 after Sultan Ahmed III gave in to rebels demanding his death.
The allegation about Albayrak had circulated before Gürcihan’s post.
Ekrem Dumanlı, a former editor in chief of the now closed Zaman newspaper, first aired the claim in a TR724 YouTube program on December 16, 2020, weeks after Albayrak announced his resignation as Treasury and Finance Minister on Instagram, citing health reasons.
Dumanlı claimed he had heard from a reliable source that Albayrak was beaten after a rupture within the Erdoğan family.
He named Erdoğan’s nephew Ali Erdoğan, who he claimed had also served as one of the president’s bodyguards, as the person involved in the alleged attack.
Prosecutors said Gürcihan presented the allegations as fact without verifying their accuracy and therefore committed the offense under Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code.
Gürcihan acknowledged that the social media account and post were hers, saying she shared the post as part of her journalistic work and believed her remarks had been misunderstood.
She apologized, according to the indictment.
The İstanbul Anadolu 78th Criminal Court of First Instance accepted the indictment and ruled that Gürcihan should remain in pretrial detention, citing what it called evidence supporting a strong suspicion that she had committed the offense and saying judicial supervision measures would not be enough.
The court asked police to determine whether the post was publicly accessible and how many times it was viewed.
Her first hearing is scheduled for August 4.
Article 217/A, adopted in 2022 as part of a law widely known as Turkey’s disinformation law, punishes anyone who publicly disseminates false information about national security, public order or public health with the sole intent of causing fear, panic or concern in a way that could disturb the public peace.
Press freedom groups say the law has become a tool to prosecute journalists and critics over reporting and commentary that authorities dispute.
The case comes amid concerns over press freedom in Turkey, which was ranked 163rd out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.