Lollobrigida was ‘tricked into marriage’
Sinatra before retiring to become a sculptor.
She agreed to marry Rigau, 34 years her junior, in 2006, but claims she quickly changed her mind and cancelled wedding plans.
‘‘We were never truly a couple, it was never intimate,’’ she said before the hearing. ‘‘When I turned him down, he offered me jewels and a villa that wasn’t his.’’
Then, in 2010, Rigau arranged a marriage before a priest in Barcelona, but used a stand-in bride, producing a letter from Lollobrigida that gave approval for the proxy. The actress sued him for fraud, saying she had not signed the letter, but a court in Barcelona threw the case out in July, ruling that it was her signature. The latest trial concerns a visit Rigau made to Italy in 2012, before the Barcelona wedding came to light. Lollobrigida’s lawyer, Fabrizio Siggia, said Rigau asked her during the visit to sign a legal document about a defamation case, shuffling papers to conceal the fact she was actually authorising their marriage under Italian law. ‘‘He was planning to wait until she died, then say he was her husband and claim her wealth,’’ Siggia said.
Lollobrigida signed, but grew suspicious when she found allegations on the internet that Rigau had been involved in previous frauds. She claims that only then did she find out about the proxy wedding in Barcelona.
Yesterday, Rigau said Lollobrigida married him willingly and that he was not guilty. ‘‘I was cleared in Spain so what can they do to me here?’’ But Spanish lawyer Javier Saavedra, who represented Rigau from 2006 to 2009, said: ‘‘Rigau told me ‘I must stage a false marriage with Gina’.’’