A Warsaw court set 18 January for Nawrocki to testify—either in person or remotely—following the first public hearing in the civil case on Tuesday.
The president is suing publisher Ringier Axel Springer Polska, which owns Onet, over an article published in May 2025, during last year's presidential election campaign.
Titled "Karol Nawrocki and the secrets of the Grand Hotel," the report alleged that he helped bring prostitutes to guests while working as a security guard at the Grand Hotel in Sopot around 20 years ago.
Nawrocki, who rejected the allegations at the time as "a pack of lies and hatred," is seeking a formal apology.
Tuesday’s session was the fifth hearing in the proceedings, which began in September, but the first open to the public.
The court heard three witnesses.
A former security colleague testified that she saw Nawrocki escort a man and a woman to guest floors in a lift in 2006 or 2007.
She said he later suggested staff could earn extra money by bringing women to guests—an offer she said she rejected.
She added that her belief that the woman was a sex worker was based entirely on that conversation, not her appearance.
A high school friend of Nawrocki, who also worked in hotel security at the time, said he had no recollection of anyone on the team bringing people to guests, and that the president had never mentioned such activity.
Journalist Piotr Głuchowski, who wrote about the allegations in a 2024 profile for daily Gazeta Wyborcza, also gave evidence.
He declined to reveal his source, whom he previously described as an "old acquaintance" of the president.
Nawrocki’s lawyers asked the court to make Głuchowski name the person, but it refused.
It did, however, ordered Onet’s editor-in-chief and the article’s authors to submit any recordings of their interviews with the two informants.
The aim is to establish whether proper journalistic due diligence was observed.
The judge indicated that Nawrocki’s testimony would be one of the final stages of the trial before closing arguments and a ruling.
The president has also filed a separate criminal defamation complaint against the article’s authors, with a preliminary hearing set for November.
(ał)
Source: IAR, PAP