Today veteran doctor Josie Muscat, prison inmate Erin Tanti, and his girlfriend Marisa Gallo were charged with illegally smuggling Tanti’s semen out of prison and using it to impregnate Gallo — in one of the more surreal stories to have hit Malta this year.But what nobody expected was the reveal of the girlfriend’s identity: Gallo is a criminology graduate who literally wrote her 2023 dissertation on conjugal rights in prison. It isn’t clear when the two started their relationship, but in her thesis she even dedicated the work to “my boyfriend Erin, who has been a source of strength, emotional support and motivation despite our challenging relationship.”In court, prosecutors laid out the bizarre chain of events. Investigators believe a prison doctor helped Tanti extract semen inside Corradino and that a prison nurse acted as a go-between, passing messages from Gallo. From there, a medical courier carried the sample to St James Hospital in Sliema, where Muscat allegedly performed two insemination procedures in November 2024. The hospital doesn’t even hold a licence for assisted reproduction, and the Embryo Protection Authority had already told the couple they weren’t authorised for treatment.Gallo has since given birth to the child. Both she and Tanti cooperated with police, with Tanti admitting his wish to be a parent and claiming prison authorities had given him verbal approval – though he had no paperwork to back that up.Against this backdrop, parts of Gallo’s dissertation read less like academic theory and more like diary entries. At one point, she writes: “Family members of incarcerated individuals may experience their own emotional distress … especially for partner/spouse … feelings of isolation and abandonment.” In another: “Private visits can help maintain a sense of continuity in their intimate relationships despite the physical separation caused by incarceration.”The observations aren’t in and of themselves outrageous, but they do feel just a little on the nose given what we now know.It’s not clear if the University of Malta knew about her relationship with Tanti when she submitted the work – and while the validity of her dissertation is hardly Malta’s most pressing issue right now, it does raise the question of how “objective” it really was.As for Tanti, he remains in Corradino serving 20 years after admitting to the wilful homicide of his 15-year-old student back in 2014 – a case that shocked Malta and is now back in the headlines in the most unexpected way.•