The photograph is so lurid that any respectable woman would die at the very thought of it being placed on public view.
Evidently snatched without the subject’s consent, it shows her climbing a staircase wearing nothing but an unbuttoned, waist-length jacket and black high heels.
Though her face has been deliberately obscured, she would doubtless recognise the scene – and recall how it unfolded – from the ornate balustrade against which she steadies herself.
The man behind the camera will certainly remember this intimate occasion.
For he was her husband, and – in a despicable act of marital betrayal – he allegedly posted the sneak picture on a voyeuristic Italian Facebook group called Mia Moglie, which translates as ‘My Wife’.
When this sick, publicly open group was exposed last week, it sparked a national outcry even in trenchantly chauvinist Italy, the land that gave us the word ‘machismo’, the concept of masculine supremacy.
Opposition politicians urged Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (who dumped her TV anchor boyfriend for grabbing his crotch as he pestered his co-host for a threesome) to reverse an ‘unacceptable patriarchal mentality that reduces women to objects and instruments of possession’.
Meanwhile, as hundreds of victims discover to their horror that their husbands and boyfriends posted their private photos on My Wife, marriages are breaking up and families falling apart.
Italian feminist campaigners are comparing their ordeal with that of Gisele Pelicot, pictured, the French wife whose husband drugged her for strangers to abuse
Hundreds of victims are discovering that their partners have posted private photos on a voyeuristic Italian Facebook group called Mia Moglie, which translates as ‘My Wife’
Though these women weren’t physically attacked, Italian feminist campaigners are comparing their ordeal with that of Gisele Pelicot, the French wife whose husband drugged her for strangers to abuse.
Men who post compromising pictures of women without consent have committed ‘virtual rape’, they contend.
Outrage grew when it emerged that images first appeared on My Wife as long as ago as May, meaning the group was active for four months despite the insistence of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, that it closely monitors the site and removes illegal or offensive sexual content.
It was only on August 20 that the giant American corporation closed it down at the request of the Italian Postal Police, which investigates digital crime and had begun receiving dozens of complaints. By then it had attracted 32,000 members, many of whom were outward bastions of the Italian establishment, including doctors, lawyers, and even police officers. For obvious reasons, most were careful to protect their anonymity.
When he saw the above-mentioned semi-naked woman climbing the ornate staircase, however, Mauro Castagnini, a middle-aged man from Liguria, northern Italy, recklessly responded to the erotic image using a profile carrying his name and picture.
Being a car mechanic, he evidently thought it amusing to use a motoring metaphor when lusting over the unwitting woman.
‘Congratulations, let us try her out too, she won’t be overused,’ Castagnini wrote.
‘A quick wash and dry and she’ll be as good as new, as though she’s just been run in.’
The #MeToo movement virtually passed Italy by – to the extent that Italian actress Asia Argento, pictured, became a pariah for revealing that Harvey Weinstein raped her
Confronted by the Daily Mail, he didn’t deny posting this sordid comment but claimed there was nothing to suggest that the woman had been caught unawares. ‘If anything whoever took the photo will be held responsible,’ he told us.
Perhaps so, but as Giancarlo Gennaro, the Postal Police chief leading the investigation into this squalid affair, told me at his Rome office this week, tracking down and prosecuting the offenders won’t be easy.
Under the Italian penal code, disseminating sexually explicit images, having created or stolen them without the subject’s consent, is punishable by up to six years in jail and a £15,000 fine.
If the culprit is a spouse, or has been in a relationship with the victim, the sentence can be increased to nine years. Comments deemed offensive or inciteful are also punishable with prison terms.
In this case it’s clear that the pictures were non-consensual, deputy assistant commissioner Gennaro says. Yet as the couple involved could be the only witnesses and their stories will probably be at odds, proving this in court presents a challenge.
As most pictures on My Wife are hard to identify – back views taken when the victims were lying on sunbeds or showering, flashes of partial nudity captured as they undressed – this presents investigators with another problem.
With its benign-looking home page – a colourful tableau depicting people gardening and painting – a casual browser would have mistaken the Facebook group for a meeting place for wholesome hobby enthusiasts. Since the words My Wife were accompanied by three red love hearts, this misapprehension would be more understandable. The group’s administrator appeared to be a proud husband showing off his spouse’s craftwork, not a faceless sexual deviant.
It meant that many women only learned that they featured in the grisly gallery when they or their friends happened to click on the page and recognise an item of their clothing or background furniture. Even when wives and girlfriends have been confronted with the truth, police are finding some reluctant to make formal complaints, for in Italian culture family life is sacrosanct and blind loyalty is a marital duty.
Opposition politicians urged Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, pictured, to reverse an ‘unacceptable patriarchal mentality that reduces women to objects’
So, last Friday, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Gennaro made a TV appeal for anyone who so much as suspected they might be a victim to contact police.
According to Italy’s Channel 5, which broadcast his entreaty, it is proving highly successful. By Monday more than 3,000 women from every region of Italy had come forward, an unprecedented response for the Postal Police.
Speaking to me through a friend, however, a 42-year-old mother of two from Southern Italy described the agonising dilemma she faces.
After news items about My Wife began circulating last week, she said, her husband confessed to posting photos of her.
But the ones he showed her were not explicit and he passed them off as harmless fun. Suspecting he was hiding something, though, she later hacked into his account with Telegram, the secure messaging app he supposedly needed for his ‘sensitive’ job, and found he was using it to send strangers the explicit selfies they occasionally exchanged to spice up their love life.
One picture was posted in a Telegram chatroom called ‘Cuckold’, one of several ‘safe’ platforms where men who met on My Wife are believed to have swapped much harder pornographic images of their partners. ‘Why don’t you try this with my wife. Tell me what you’d like to do with her,’ her husband of seven years had beckoned his contacts, boasting that she was highly sexed.
Her sense of degradation and violation made her feel as though her ‘world was caving in’, she says, adding: ‘It is as bad as being raped, absolutely. My pictures will be out there for ever, and I’ll never know how many men have downloaded them.’
When she presented her husband with the evidence of his duplicity, he refused to apologise. Preposterously, he accused her of overreacting and blamed her for trying to wreck their marriage.
Despite all this, she remains in the family home, at least for now, for the sake of their children, and won’t report him to the police because the type of work he does means he would be sacked instantly (she declines to say what he does) and ruined.
The wife of ‘Anonymous Participant 127’ is taking a harder line and promptly kicked her husband out.
Telling her story to Alpha Mom, an online community for Italian women, she says she discovered her photograph on My Wife after joining the group under the guise of a man, with the intention of writing about it.
Scrolling down the page, she was shocked to find perverted comments from some of the most respectable professional men in her city, some of whom she knew and admired.
It was as she browsed through the earliest photos, posted in May, that she came across her own image.
Though she didn’t immediately recognise the woman she was gazing at, a bed in the background was clearly hers and the stomach-churning reality dawned.
Pelicot was awarded with a French Legion of Honour for her bravery in speaking out about the horrific sexual abuse she endured
The crushing shock deepened as she read the observations below her picture.
‘The lady has a nice mare’s physique,’ one man drooled. Another urged her husband to show more of her, but he said he couldn’t because she was ‘ashamed’ to flaunt her figure.
‘Why is she ashamed?’ came the reply. ‘Women usually like to show themselves off.’
His response tells us all we need to know about the mindless sexism that still pervades Italian society.
It may also explain a disturbing claim made to me by Green Party spokesperson Fiorella Zabatta. Appalled by the posts she found when investigating My Wife last week, she attempted to lodge a formal complaint at the local police station in Sicily, where she is holidaying.
Yet male officers refused to take the matter seriously, she claims, and made it as difficult as possible for her to make a statement.
According to many Italian women, this sort of attitude is woven into the Roman DNA. It dates back to the days of hedonistic emperors such as Caligula, who forced courtiers to watch him ravish their wives.
When more modern Latin leaders traduce vulnerable females, their sins are invariably forgiven.
One thinks of priapic prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was convicted of having under-age sex with a harem of ‘Bunga-Bunga Girls’ in 2013, when he was in his mid-70s.
Acquitted on appeal, his popularity was enhanced among Italians who admired his enduring virility.
Though sex crimes are increasing worryingly in Italy, and more than half of all women said they had been sexually assaulted or abused by the age of 19 in a recent poll, the justice system has not progressed.
Victim-smearing is an effective defence tactic, and a judge even acquitted two men of raping a Peruvian girl after accepting their vile assertion – that she had been ‘too ugly’ to arouse them.
As for the #MeToo movement, it has virtually passed Italy by, to the extent that Italian actress Asia Argento became a pariah for having the courage to reveal that Harvey Weinstein raped her.
Given such antediluvian attitudes, the appeal of a forum such as My Wife becomes less surprising. One member described his partner with chilling dispassion: ’30 years old, height 1.81, weight 59, breasts natural’. And he gave her so-called ‘body count’ – the number of men she had slept with – as ‘one’. Sounding like some ancient Roman overlord hawking his chattel at a slave market, he pronounced that her lack of experience gave her ‘added value’.
What then, does Meta have to say about its apparent lapse in vigilance and the misery it has caused? This week I put a series of pressing questions to the company.
Crucial among them were: why My Wife went under the radar for so long, what would become of the intimate photos stored there, and whether redress would be made to the women.
Since the Postal Police say Meta is co-operating with their investigation by giving them access to the closed-down site and providing members’ IP addresses, I also inquired how this squared with the company’s privacy policy.
They addressed only some of these points. While the group was created in 2019 – by an unnamed Facebook user whose account has not been active since then – no content was posted until May this year, they confirmed.
Artificial intelligence technology finds over 90 per cent of inappropriate content before anyone reports it, and millions of violating posts and accounts are removed from Facebook and Instagram each day. Meta also employs 40,000 trained reviewers to scour the two sites for potential violations.
My Wife was removed for violating policies banning the sharing of intimate images without the pictured person’s consent.
‘We do not allow content that threatens or promotes sexual violence, sexual assault or sexual exploitation on our platforms,’ said a spokesperson.
As for the provision of users to the Italian authorities, Meta said it responds to such requests ‘in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service’.
This is all well and good. However, it doesn’t explain how the world’s largest social media platform failed to detect the humiliation of so many unwitting women by so many lusting men for so long.
Italian law classifies this crime as ‘revenge porn’, and as victims have six months to press charges, police believe they could yet amass enough evidence to prosecute thousands of treacherous men in the sort of ‘maxi trial’ usually reserved for the Mafia.
It might be too much to hope that such a showcase event could be the catalyst that ends the age of patriarchy.
Yet it could at least mean prying lenses are no longer trained on Latin wives as they ascend the stairs to the bedroom.
- Additional reporting by Cristina Cennamo
