Asia’s alleged victim feared speaking out
A young actor who alleged in legal documents that Italian actress and filmmaker Asia Argento sexually assaulted him when he was 17 said that his trauma resurfaced when Argento came out as a victim of sexual assault herself last year.
“I did not initially speak out about my story because I chose to handle it in private with the person who wronged me,” Jimmy Bennett, now 22, said through his attorney Gordon K. Sattro.
The comments were his first made publicly since a Sunday New York Times story saying Argento reached a $380,000 [Dh1.39 million] legal settlement with him last year over an alleged sexual assault in a California hotel room in 2013.
“I have not made a public statement in the past days and hours because I was ashamed and afraid to be part of the public narrative. I was underage when the event took place, and I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time.”
Bennett said he believed there was a stigma to being sexually assaulted as a male, and that he “didn’t think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy.”
His comments come a day after the 42-year-old Argento denied having a sexual relationship with him. She said in a statement that she was linked “in friendship only” to Bennett, who played her son in a film in 2004.
She said the $380,000 payment, made in response to a notice of intent to sue for $3.5 million in damages that Bennett had filed, was undertaken by her boyfriend Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef who killed himself in France in June.
“Anthony personally undertook to help Bennett economically, upon the condition that we would no longer suffer any further intrusions in our life,” Argento’s statement said.