That is the mind-blowing slut shaming going on in Italy which led to Harvey Weinstein victim, Asia Argento, leaving her home country.

Argento’s story was just one of the many accounts of gross sexual misconduct by Weinstein that featured in the New York Times article “Decades of Sexual Harassment Accusations Against Harvey Weinstein” – here – where she detailed how Weinstein sexually assaulted her in a hotel room 20 years ago, when she was 21.

But instead of receiving support from her fellow Italians, she has received an overwhelming amount of victim shaming.

Just take this for example, from Mashable:

Far-right daily Libero, for example, published an article by Renato Farina entitled: “First they give it away, then they whine and pretend to repent.” The subtitle reads: “Falling for your boss’s sexual advances is prostitution, not rape.”

Via Twitter, Argento responded saying she would sue the newspaper for “harming her reputation and insulting her dignity as a woman”.

But the author of the column, Farina, clearly didn’t bat an eyelid at the threat, and published another article directed at Argento saying:

“I will explain you the difference between a rapist and a pig.”

Speaking to Variety, Argento explained that she had been slut-shamed by the Italian press:

“I am being shamed by the Italian media, which is medieval,” she said, adding that “until the 60’s you could kill your wife and it was called murder of honor [sic], if she had cheated.”

“Until 1996 rape was considered a crime against morals, not against a person,” she said.

In a TV interview, Argento said she “had to leave the country and temporarily settle in Berlin, Germany to escape the wave of misogyny and sexism that followed her after the New Yorker article”:

“I don’t see what I can do there — I’ll come back when things improve to fight alongside all the other women,” she said. “I didn’t have to courage to speak until now because you see what happened, twenty years after the attack?”

Argento has received plenty of support as well, with Italian writer and radio present Giulia Blasi coining the hashtag #quellavoltache (that time when), the Italian equivalent of the #MeToo movement, which is being used for Italian women to tell their story of sexual harassment.

Speaking of, one of my #MeToo stories involves teenage Italians groping me with reckless abandon while I was in Berlin. I have never felt so scared in my life.

[source:mashable]