In just over ten years in the public eye, Rosianne Cutajar has captured more headlines than most politicians do in careers spanning decades.

Cutajar went from being a relatively unknown young woman teaching Italian in a secondary school to becoming Malta's youngest female mayor, its youngest member of parliament and eventually a junior minister.

But she attracted the most attention not for her public life, but for her private one.

Following weeks of controversy, she resigned as a government MP on Monday afternoon, bowing to pressure following the publication of thousands of chats between her and Yorgen Fenech.

An Italian teacher

Cutajar is a teacher by profession and taught Italian at St Albert the Great College between 2010 and 2014.

She grew her public profile at Labour media station ONE and in 2012 started rising to fame after being elected the first female mayor of Qormi and the youngest female mayor, at age 22.

Rosianne Cutajar in 2015.

Cutajar would secure a second term as mayor and gradually solidified her position within Joseph Muscat's Labour Party. She worked as an events coordinator at the 2015 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and also served as a communications coordinator within Muscat's office. 

Youngest MP

Cutajar swapped local for national politics in 2017, when she contested her first general election and was elected as the youngest member of the 2017-2022 legislature. 

Rosianne Cutajar was first elected as an MP in 2017.

The leaked chats between herself and Yorgen Fenech indicate that the pair had an intimate relationship during the first years of that legislature. The chats date back to 2019. 

By then, it appears that she had become frustrated with being overlooked for cabinet positions and complained to Fenech that she was demotivated.

Cutajar told Fenech that she was disappointed because Joseph Muscat had not appointed her to cabinet.

She was never appointed to cabinet during Muscat’s tenure, but she nonetheless managed to push for change and reforms from the backbench.

Cremation, civil rights and sex work

Cutajar spearheaded a private members bill that paved the way for the introduction of cremation services and publicly called for the legalisation of medicinal and recreational use of cannabis, the introduction of vote-16 and broader IVF and civil rights, most of which were eventually introduced or passed as laws.

Cutajar was an advocate of broader civil and LGBTIQ rights. Photo: DOI Reuben Piscopo.

She had also begun advocating and working on a reform that would regularise sex work and change prostitution laws. Those efforts, however, stalled in the face of vocal opposition.  

Appointed parliamentary secretary

Cutajar finally saw her wish come true in January 2020, when Robert Abela replaced Muscat as Labour leader and prime minister and appointed her to his first cabinet as parliamentary secretary for civil rights and reforms under Edward Zammit Lewis’ justice ministry.

While in cabinet, she advocated in favour of an improvement of prisoners’ conditions and she was among the most vocal government politicians to speak against racial hatred.

A year after Ivorian migrant Lassana Cisse was killed in an apparently racially-motivated drive-by shooting, she laid a wreath on the site where he was killed, called out racism and racial hatred and said his death should serve as an eye-opener on the importance of integration.

Cutajar laid a wreath in honour of Ivorian migrant Lassana Cisse a year after his death.

The gender quota bill

As parliamentary secretary for reforms, Cutajar also played a leading role in steering a gender quota bill which allowed more women to be elected to parliament after last year's election.

MPs had started discussing the bill in January 2021 but by the time it was approved in April, Cutajar was no longer in cabinet, having been forced to step down as junior minister. 

The first resignation

Cutajar was moved out of cabinet after Times of Malta revealed how she had benefited from a property deal involving Yorgen Fenech, who faces charges of complicity in the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

She received cash from Fenech as part of her role in brokering a €3.1 million property sale in 2019, which fell through after his arrest in connection with the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Cutajar had taken a €9,000 cut from a €40,000 pile of cash passed on to her by Fenech as part of the property deal and made no reference to these payments in her annual parliamentary financial declarations.

She also solicited help from Fenech for a political survey in her district in 2019 and made a speech criticising the Council of Europe for its report criticising 17 Black, around the time she was negotiating a property deal with its owner. 

At the time, Fenech had already been unmasked as the owner of 17 Black, a secret company set up to funnel money into the Panama accounts of then OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri and minister Konrad Mizzi.

The chats indicated that Cutajar and Fenech shared an intimate relationship.

Initially, she had resigned pending an investigation by then-standards commissioner George Hyzler and her resignation was confirmed a few months later after Hyzler found her in breach of ethics in public life.

Left out of cabinet again

Cutajar contested the 2022 general election but needed Ian Borg to vacate his sixth district seat to secure a return to parliament through a casual election.

With her property deal scandal still fresh in people's minds, Cutajar was left out of cabinet. She continued to serve as a backbench Labour MP until Monday, when she resigned from the Labour parliamentary group to continue as an independent MP.

But her public life remained tumultuous, as she continued to land in hot water over myriad allegations, campaign moves and video leaks.

Cutajar posted this picture to her Facebook page showing her at the gym with the Prime Minister.

Cocaine - and oranges to the elderly

In June 2021, she and her partner, Daniel Farrugia, voluntarily underwent a drug test after a video was leaked on social media showing Farrugia in the presence of a man taking what appeared to be cocaine.

Both Cutajar and Farrugia denied any wrongdoing and the test results were negative.

Less than a month later, Cutajar got embroiled in another controversy, this time for handing out oranges to the elderly during a campaign event in a care home in her district.

Civil society NGO Repubblika had asked the police to investigate her for allegedly breaking the law on ‘treating’. The law prohibits the distribution of food and drinks to influence votes. But the issue eventually died down and no criminal action was taken.

Admitted to smoking weed

While she was still parliamentary secretary in 2020, Cutajar had also admitted to reporters that she smoked cannabis when she was younger.

She was speaking to Lovin Malta in a vox pop on the first day of parliament after the summer recess.

“I did when I was much much younger though,” she said, adding that she was in favour of the legalisation of recreational cannabis but more work needed to be done before the country could take that step. The law was eventually passed a little over a year later.

But the biggest storm was yet to be unleashed.

In a book he published in 2021, author Mark Camilleri claimed a close personal relationship between Cutajar and Yorgen Fenech after he was identified as the owner of the secret company 17 Black.

Camilleri added fuel to the fire in a Facebook post in which he claimed the MP had obtained money from Fenech to defend him against the accusations he was facing and to attack Caruana Galizia's investigative work.

Cutajar sued him for defamation.

Mark Camilleri claimed Cutajar had obtained money from Fenech to defend him against the accusations he was facing and to attack Caruana Galizia's investigative work. And Cutajar sued him.

The Yors chats

That libel case, which remains ongoing, became national news last month when Camilleri published hundreds of pages of Whatsapp chats between Cutajar and Fenech dating back to 2019, to prove his claim.

And the story only became more talked about last week, when it was revealed that Cutajar and her partner are expecting a baby girl.

All throughout, pressure on her to resign mounted. Even the prime minister, who first downplayed the chat revelations, eventually said that he expected all MPs to "assume responsibility for their actions". 

Cutajar has said that she intends to stay on as a member of parliament while also dedicating more time to her growing family and professional development. 

Time will tell whether her shift to being an independent MP is the final chapter in her career as an elected official, as it was for Konrad Mizzi.  

Abela has said that her career as a Labour Party politician is over. But a week is a long time in politics and Cutajar, 35, has time on her side.