For Andrea Giambruno, a 42-year-old journalist and presenter of a Mediaset program in Italy, the sexist and vulgar comments he made to his female colleagues have cost him dearly. His ex-partner, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, announced the breakup of the relationship on Friday after the embarrassing phrases he said into a closed microphone during his TV show, Diario del Giorno, were broadcast on television. and also now Mediaset is considering firing him for having violated the company's code of ethics.
"My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which has lasted almost ten years, ends here. I thank him for the wonderful years we have spent together, for the difficulties we have gone through and for giving me the most important thing in my life, which is our daughter Ginevra", wrote in a post on social networks the leader of Brothers of Italy, in an image of the two of them with their daughter. The premier explains that their paths have been separated for some time, so it is time to "take note". "I will defend what we were, I will defend our friendship and I will defend, yes or no, a seven-year-old girl who loves her mother and loves her father, as I could not love mine. I have nothing more to say on the subject", she continued, recalling the painful abandonment she suffered from her father when she was just a child.
The straw that broke the camel's back came this week, after the comedy show Striscia la notizia, also from Mediaset, broadcast these closed-microphone conversations with her female colleagues. It all started on Wednesday, when they published footage recorded during a break in the show in which he was bragging about his hair and making other off-key comments, even going so far as to ask a reporter: “Why haven't I met you before? ".
But on Thursday night's show he went further, telling a co-worker things like: “Can I touch the package while I'm talking to you? -"You've already done it", she replied-, "are you engaged?" or "are you an open-minded person?". "Do you know that me and (XXXXX) are having a story? All of Mediaset knows it, now you know it too, but we are looking for a third participant to make trios, even quartets with...", he can be heard saying. He then asks her if she would join his "work group" and, when she says yes and asks if she has to take any "aptitude tests," he replies, "Yes, it's okay."
It is not the first time that the journalist has embarrassed the Prime Minister. At the end of August, after the case of a group rape in Palermo became known that shocked Italy, Giambruno was in the news for a controversial sentence in which he assured that women who do not get drunk "avoid the wolf". He had also been criticized by the progressive press in July for words that were described as climate denialism after he joked about the heat wave that was punishing Italy as something that was "not great news", and caused an uproar phrase against the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, who had assured that climate change was "destroying the south of Europe" and that if things continued like this, tourism in Italy would not have a "long-term" future. "If you don't feel good, you stay at home. You're in the Black Forest, you're fine there, aren't you?”, the journalist said at the time.
The Italian prime minister met Giambruno in 2014, when she was just the leader of Brothers of Italy, then a new far-right Italian party, when she went as a guest on a TV show he was working on. Thus began a relationship that gave birth to their seven-year-old daughter Ginevra. They never got married, despite the fierce defense of the traditional family by the Italian Prime Minister. Yesterday, his coalition partners, starting with his two deputy prime ministers, showed their solidarity with him with public messages. "All those who hoped to weaken me by punishing me at home should know that no matter how much the drop waits to be able to pierce the stone, the stone remains stone and the drop is only water", warned the premier.
