Dear Director Feltri,
I remember that last year you sided in defense of the former partner of the Prime Minister Andrea Giambruno, morally condemned for the outburst broadcast on the program Striscia
the News. The journalist’s behavior had sparked outrage on the right and left. She, as always, stood out. What do you think of Giambruno’s return to TV?
Luca Cavallari
Dear Luca,
I was pleased to see my friend Andrea on the small screen, not because of the respect I have for him, but out of a sense of justice. This man was not guilty of any crime, yet he suffered a merciless media pillory for nothing, just because he was male and only because he was Giorgia Meloni’s partner and the father of their splendid daughter. He was eliminated professionally, he was publicly dumped by his partner, who deemed it necessary, to protect her role, to urgently provide some clarifications regarding his private life, in order to contain any damage and the tsunami that the service of Striscia would have unleashed and in fact unleashed. In short, Andrea went through a real hell, experienced with a profound sense of discomfort, desperation and shame, as he said in the television interview given to Paolo Del Debbio, all for a few jokes in a Sport bar, unpleasant yes, it’s true, but not enough to lead to accusations of harassment and sexism.
The boy was naive, he believed he was in a friendly environment, underestimating the fact that at work there are no friends but rather colleagues and antagonists and that you should never let your guard down, especially when you are the partner of the most important woman in Italy, the one who holds the reins of the country in her hands. I point out that it is at least curious that a chauvinist, such as Andrea is defined, is the companion of a lady so emancipated as to be the first female prime minister, not of a housewife who stands behind the stove stirring with curlers on her head, waiting for the husband come home.
I am not scandalized by the playful, light-hearted, joking attitude held by Giambruno during a work break, I am scandalized by the fact that, by leveraging this, an attempt was made to give him the image of a monster, let’s say a “pig”. Giambruno is yet another individual victim of that process and of that war on males which we now witness every day in a resigned manner. In this case, I repeat, there was an aggravating circumstance: being the companion of. An aggravating circumstance that unleashed the left-wing haters, who seized the opportunity to rail against the alleged misogynistic right. The journalist in question, in this narrative, represented the fascist, racist, sexist male par excellence. In those terrible days I happened to hear Giambruno on the phone. He was completely destroyed, demoralized, bent by suffering and dismayed by the ignoble accusations he received. A year after those events I found him stronger and more aware and it makes me happy to know that he will soon return to doing what he knows how to do very well, the television journalist.
However, we should begin to seriously reflect on the repercussions that such hate and defamation campaigns have on the subjects who suffer them. The alleged monster is sometimes nothing more than the victim of cruel logic based on an indisputable ideology according to which the white male is always and in any case guilty of something. Sometimes all it takes is a snippet of an outcry, a word taken out of context, or a woman pointing the finger is enough for him to be convicted without even an investigation or a trial. I find that we have taken a dangerous slope, we are beyond bad justice, we are at ancestral prejudice: we infer the guilt of a human being from his gender. The underlying thought is: if he’s male, he’s a bad person, if he’s right-wing, he’s even more so, regardless.
I would never have imagined that the feminism that pursued the progress of women and effective equality would be transformed into something unfair and deformed, that is, into a feminism of war and trial of the sex to which I belong.
Giambruno is nothing but yet another martyr sacrificed on the altar of this ideology here, blind, deaf, sick, cannibalistic which seeks males to devour because they are guilty of having paid a compliment, or of having made a joke or a whistle in the street , ideology that divides the world into
victims, all women, and ogres, all men. There will be others like him, persecuted by the media not for having committed a crime but for having in some way violated a morality deemed inviolable. It doesn’t end here.