Italian TV presenter sues over flatulent co-worker’s ‘emissions’
AS THE Italian equivalent of the BBC, it commands authority and respect, but there is a sulphurous whiff of unrest in the corridors of the country’s state broadcaster.
A leading television presenter has accused bosses at the RAI network of forcing her to share a room with a colleague with chronic flatulence – or as she delicately put it in a formal complaint, “noisy, repeated and malodorous bodily emissions”. Dania Mondini, 58, said the colleague, who has not been publicly named, was also a prodigious burper.
She claims that being forced to share a room with the man was part of a wider campaign of intimidation against her as a result of professional rivalry.
When she demanded to be moved to another room because of the unwelcome emissions, her treatment by managers became worse – she was assigned “banal” news reading assignments and subjected to “verbal aggression”, she claimed.
Two other journalists also complained about the malodorous colleague, saying they too could no longer bear to share their workspace with him.
Managers allegedly told them they would lose their jobs, with one commenting: “Any journalist who refuses to be in a room with him should be kicked up the arse.”
Ms Mondini took the public broadcaster to court after turning to the Rome public prosecutor’s office. The case, as so often in Italy’s judicial system – known for having some of Europe’s most congested courts, drawn-out legal procedures and exorbitant costs – has turned into a tortuous saga. It has already dragged on for four years but has come to light again after prosecutors ordered fresh investigations into the complaints.
“Not even in the saucy comedies of the 1970s could we have imagined reading what is being reported from the precious studios of the national broadcaster, amid sniggers, winks, nudges of the elbow and gastrointestinal problems,” one Italian commentator wrote on Wednesday. The persistent “chemical attacks” by one colleague towards another had got the whole country talking, wrote Maurizio De Caro in the Affariitaliani online newspaper.
The case has now taken a new twist, with claims that the flatulent broadcaster had inappropriate contacts with a convicted Mafia boss from the ’Ndrangheta, organised crime network based in Calabria in southern Italy.