Photo source: Romania TV video capture, January 13, 2026, in which the television channel writes on the screen: “The adultery becomes violent. Last-minute footage”, announcing a material about the journalist Emilia Șercan.
Journalist Emilia Șercan accused, on Tuesday evening, that she was harassed by a team from Romania TV and announced that she will sue the television station.
“Those from the Romania TV channel, who harassed me on the street today claiming to be doing journalism, I announce that I am suing them. Again,” wrote Șercan, in a message published on her Facebook page.
The PressOne journalist recalls that in 2025 she won a defamation lawsuit against Romania TV, in which she received 10,000 euros in moral damages, plus court costs.
“Obviously, I will also file a complaint with the National Audiovisual Council, as I did in the past, when they received a fine of 50,000 lei. (…) The attacks that this channel makes, but not only that, will not intimidate me and will not stop me from doing my job, although I know that many politicians would like to see me out of the press,” she also wrote.
“And the microphone bearers from the Romania TV channel, who pretend to be journalists, who today asked me when I will write about Coldea's doctorate, I invite them to search in the PressOne archive, to see how many years have passed since I wrote about the fact that Florian Coldea's doctoral thesis is missing from the National Library, when I wrote that he obtained the title of university lecturer at the SRI Academy without meeting the conditions or when I wrote that his wife tried to get a lecturer position at SNSPA, although she was a lecturer at the SRI Academy”, concluded the journalist.
In March 2025, Emilia Șercan won the case against Romania TV and against the producer of the show Janos Korpos. She had sued the television and the TV producer after a series of three shows in which she was denigrated, following an article in which it was shown that the Prime Minister of Romania at the time, Nicolae Ciucă, had plagiarized in his doctoral thesis. The decision from then on was final.
The accusations of plagiarism against Minister Radu Marinescu and PSD's reaction
PressOne published a press investigation on Monday, signed by Emilia Șercan, which shows that more than half of the doctoral thesis in Law of the Minister of Justice, Radu Marinescu, is plagiarized. According to the analysis, at least 56.68% of the pages of the work with the title “Evidence system in the civil process” contain text copied from other authors, more precisely 140 of the 247 pages of the work.
Radu Marinescu reacted to the PressOne investigation, stating that “truth cannot be synonymous with simple media allegations, even bizarre” and insisting that his thesis was “in accordance with the legislation at that time”.
Also on Monday, in the first public reaction after the revelations in PressOne, PSD harshly attacked the journalist Emilia Șercan and accused a “vile maneuver”: “A person cannot substitute himself for the legal institutions of the state and cannot give verdicts that clearly contradict the official decisions of these courts, even less when the person in question is himself an impostor and plagiarized his own bachelor thesis”.
The PSD accused a political attack aimed at the dismissal of the minister.
“If the approach had been in good faith, the accusations against the minister would have been formulated at the time of his appointment to head the Ministry of Justice, not right now when he started the legal procedures for the appointment of the heads of prosecutors, stating that he will not allow political interference!”, according to the statement sent by the party.
The Social-Democrats stated that they give Minister Radu Marinescu “full political support” for the fulfillment of the mandate and that they will categorically oppose any “attempts of political subordination of Justice”.
On Tuesday, the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences of the University of Bucharest (FJSC) expressed its “full support” towards Emilia Șercan, who is a lecturer at the faculty, in the context of the attacks from PSD representatives.
FJSC “asks political actors and citizens to show responsibility and to refrain from any form of incitement to hatred and aggression. Attempts to discredit journalists are incompatible with the values of the rule of law”, reads the press release of the Faculty of Journalism of the University of Bucharest.
The faculty noted that attacks on the press have reached an unprecedented level even in democratic societies, and the widespread use of social networks has led to the propagation of threatening or hateful messages, including against journalists.
“Incitement to hatred can degenerate into serious forms of aggression and harassment at any time. The pressures, threats and attempts to discredit journalists who do their job honestly undermine the foundations of a democratic society, therefore the safety of journalists must be an absolute priority for public institutions and for democratically elected leaders”, writes the statement signed by Bogdan Oprea, director of the Journalism Department of FJSC.
