Two days after a clip of her partner’s behaviour on a Mediaset set went viral, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni ended the relationship in a post on social media. “My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which lasted almost 10 years, ends here,” she wrote on a Friday in October 2023.
Giambruno, a television journalist, presented a show on Mediaset’s news output. CNN described the video as shot during a commercial break in front of a live audience and posted on the program’s own accounts and website. In it, he walks around the set and asks a female co-host whether she has a boyfriend. He then asks whether she wants group sex and touches his groin as he talks to her. She looks down at the desk. A second off-air recording had him telling a colleague, “Let’s have a threesome, even a foursome,” according to The Guardian.
The couple have a seven-year-old daughter, Ginevra. Meloni thanked 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.” Then came the line about the distance between them: “Our paths have diverged for some time and it is time to acknowledge it.”
She also wrote that she would “defend, at all costs, a seven-year-old who loves her mother and father in a way I could not love mine.” Meloni was brought up by a single mother and was estranged from her father, who, according to her autobiography, was a drug addict who spent time in prison. She said she had nothing more to add and asked critics not to use her problems at home for political gain. Several coalition figures, among them Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani, posted “hugs” in support.
The show goes off air
Giambruno said through his agent that he and Mediaset had “agreed” to suspend his show. He was not in the anchor chair for that Friday’s taping. Mediaset told a CNN affiliate it was “investigating the facts,” and later confirmed the suspension without giving a reason. Mediaset was once owned by the late Silvio Berlusconi and has long been criticised for sexist content.
This was not Giambruno’s first embarrassment for the prime minister. In September he said on air that women who avoid getting drunk might avoid trouble, after a run of high-profile rape cases. Meloni defended him then, saying his words were “hasty” and had been misinterpreted. “I believe in freedom of the press and I don’t tell him what to say,” she said. In July, when temperatures hit records in Italy, he had brushed off the heat with the remark “Heat in the summer isn’t big news.”
Meloni has drawn criticism for her emphasis on traditional families when she and Giambruno never married. Her spokespeople did not answer CNN’s requests for comment. Neither did Giambruno.
Sources
- Italian PM Giorgia Meloni splits from partner after his sexist comments
- Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni publicly dumps partner over lewd remarks | CNN
