Sexual harassment scandal at RAI and Berlusconi’s TV empire shakes Italian police arrest Greta Thunberg after another protest

Sexual violence did not stop with minors either. The Sicilian Pamela Villoresi was only 15 years old, a beautiful girl, as she says herself, and she really wanted to be in the movie. “The producers listened to me for two minutes during the audition, then they told me to undress,” says the 66-year-old director of the Teatro Biondo in Palermo.

Of course, she immediately ran away, but similar things happened to her again and again throughout her career. She went to the police several times to report the perpetrators. ‘You didn’t believe me. They told me to audio record the attacks. But I was still young, I was afraid to meet these men alone again.”

Pamela Villoresi is one of dozens of actresses who, five years after the scandal surrounding the sexual assault of Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein in the United States, reported analogous coercion, harassment and widespread sexism in the Italian film and theater scene.

Another is actress and director Susanna Nicchiarelli. She says: “Italy is still partly a patriarchal and masculine society, and in the film world this attitude is the general mainstream.” When a woman is harassed, the prevailing opinion is that it was the woman who provoked the assault. The young actresses know about the habits in this industry and should not behave like that.

Rejection and hatred instead of togetherness

When actresses started the MeToo debate in the US in late 2017, Asia Argento was virtually the only one to join the movement in Italy. She was also a victim of Weinstein in 1997. Instead of solidarity, the 47-year-old actress experienced rejection and hatred in Italy.

“The result of my complaint was a media tsunami,” explains Argento, who experienced the so-called “victim blaming” of traditional and social media. “They said I could have said no and that I only did the ad to get publicity.” She needed 16 years of psychotherapy to process the experience of violence.

But in recent years, the tide has also turned in Italy: two organizations of actresses, “Amleta” and “Differenza Donna”, have collected more than 200 reports in the past two years of colleagues who are also victims of sexual violence, harassment, assault , threats and unwanted compliments and invitations.

“The attacks are widespread, it is completely unbearable,” stressed the president of “Amleta”, the actress Cinzia Spanó, to the foreign press in Rome at the beginning of the week. And even Italy’s most successful influencer, Chiara Ferragni, with 27 million followers, no longer wants to accept sexism in Italian society: as co-moderator of the Sanremo Schlager Festival, she particularly wants to sensitize young women to the subject and encourage them abuse to display.

Berlusconi and Co are a particular problem

Silvio Berlusconi’s private TV channels are a problem in Italy. The former prime minister, who made headlines with his bunga-bunga sex parties, had already set the tone and established manners in the 1990s: “On the set of a feature film produced by Mediaset, I discovered several caravans in which ministers and members of parliament sat with actresses,” says director and screenwriter Roberta Lena.

“A young colleague told me that if you want to make a career, you have to sleep with at least two MPs.” In any case, the voters of Forza Italia still shrug their shoulders at the attacks – otherwise Berlusconi would have long since disappeared as a politician – and not an indispensable coalition partner of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

At the state broadcaster RAI, Italy’s largest cultural company, the situation is not much better than at Mediaset. “For years, the officials were forced to play the roles with the playmates of the politicians instead of the actresses chosen by the directors,” says Pamela Villoresi.

The allegations relate to events that took place several years ago, but the sexism in the national broadcaster is still reflected in the management floor, where men occupy three of the four chairmen of the board. The “gender gap” also manifests itself in RAI’s own productions: in 2021, only 37 percent of the roles were played by women – and mostly in line with the usual stereotypes: as a housewife or caretaker. (aargauerzeitung.ch)