Premier Giorgia Meloni on Friday
announced she was separating from her partner and father of her
daughter after he was secretly recorded making sleazy comments
on threesome and foursomes to a female TV colleague and
seemingly admitting to an affair.
Meloni, 46, and TV presenter Andrea Giambruno, 42, have been
together almost 10 years and have a seven year old daughter,
Ginevra.
In the off-air recordings, broadcast by a satirical TV show
Thursday night, Giambruno is heard telling a woman that "you
have to f**k to get into our working group" and referring to
"threesomes and foursomes".
He is also heard apparently admitting to an affair with another
female colleague.
In the audio tape, Giambruno tells a colleague he is hitting on:
"You know that I and...are having an affair? All of Mediaset
knows it, and now you know it too...But we're looking for a
third participant, let's do some threesomes. Or even a foursome
with...".
He goes on, with another female colleague: "There's an aptitude
test for our working group...You f**k".
In her announcement, Meloni said: "My relationship with Andrea
Giambruno, which lasted almost ten years, ends here".
"I thank him for the wonderful years we spent together, for the
difficulties we went through, and for giving me the most
important thing in my life, which is our daughter Ginevra.
"Our paths have long since parted, and the time has come to take
note of this,' added Meloni, who warned: "All those who hoped to
weaken me by hitting me at home should know that however much
the drop may hope to dig into the stone, the stone remains stone
and the drop is only water," referring to a common expression
about resilience.
She added: "I will defend what we have been, I'll defend our
friendship, and I will defend, at all costs, a seven year old
girl who loves her mother and loves her father, as I was unable
to love mine.
"I have nothing else to say about this".
Meloni was brought up by a single mother in a working class area
of Rome after her father abandoned them.
Messages of solidarity with the rightwing Brothers of Italy
(FdI) leader came in from across the political spectrum,
although some leftwing parties said it was time for the Right to
stop harping on about the virtues of the traditional Christian
nuclear family.
Alessandro Zan, a centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD)
MP and LGBTQIA+ campaigner, said that after her split Meloni
should "at least leave families that want to stay together in
peace".
Meloni's FdI has introduced a bill to make surrogacy, which is
illegal in Italy but used by many gay Italian parents abroad, a
"universal crime", while the government has told city councils
to stop registering the children of same-sex couples using a
procedure based on the transcription into Italian civic
registers of the foreign birth certificates of children
conceived via surrogacy or assisted fertility, which is only
available to heterosexual couples in Italy, citing a ruling by
the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court.
Giambruno, a host on a Berlusconi channel, was also criticised
when he recently said that young women shouldn't get drunk if
they didn't want to be raped, when he described migrant flows as
"transhumance", and when he appeared to deny the human role in
climate change.
After his rape comments Meloni defended him saying he had only
offered the same advice her mother would have given, to "keep
tour eyes open and your head screwed on".
Italian media have identified the woman to whom Giambruno
reportedly directed his allegedly lewd remarks as Viviana
Guglielmi, 26, a former local sports reporter in Liguria who
joined the Berlusconi Mediaset empire several years ago.
According to the media accounts, she didn't deign to reply and
did not look at him.
Giambruno's off-air remarks were broadcast by another Mediaset
show, Striscia La Notizia.
Striscia's creator Antonio Ricci said "in the long run she'll
find out that I did her (Meloni) a favour".
Mediaset said later Giambruno had suspended himself for a week
from his job presenting the Retequattro show Diario del giorno
(Daily Diary) saying it was "considering the facts carefully".
Meloni met Giambruno in 2015 when she gave him a banana at a
televised rally after mistaking him for an aide.
He said it was love at first sight.
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