Before joining the magazine, he was a correspondent from Sicily for the news agency ANSA and the national newspaper La Stampa.

Abbate was born in Castelbuono, in the province of Palermo, and started his journalistic career in 1990 at the Giornale di Sicilia, where he work until 1997 when he moved to ANSA.

[1] Abbate angered the Mafia with a book published in 2007 with his colleague Peter Gomez [it] called I Complici ("The Accomplices") about links between politicians and Bernardo Provenzano.

In 2016, he was coordinator of the team that created the protected RegeniLeaks platform for L'Espresso to collect testimonies from whistleblowers on torture and human rights violations, and to demand justice for Giulio Regeni and for all the victims of the security services Egyptians, in collaboration with the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights.

[10][11] From 2016 to 2017, Abbate was part of the International Council on Justice of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development of the Vatican, chaired by Cardinal Peter K. A.