"I have long hoped for a change but I was wrong, and admitting it is heartbreaking." This is what Sophie Codegoni, the 23-year-old influencer who reported her ex-partner Alessandro Basciano, also an influencer, 35, arrested for stalking, wrote in a post on Instagram.
"They say it takes courage but I don't feel courageous - she writes again in the post - I simply feel like a woman and a mother who did what was necessary (...) putting my and my family's safety and serenity first."
Serial insults, death threats and assaults even in public and at work, to which were added stalking and an almost obsessive control, so much so that in a single day the phone calls and video calls would have been between 50 and 60. They were nightmare months for Codegoni, persecuted, harassed and targeted with verbal and physical violence by Basciano, her ex-partner arrested for stalking.
Born on the set of Big Brother VIP, their relationship immediately blossomed into cohabitation, with a marriage proposal on the red carpet in Venice and a baby girl, only to then reach the end of the line with difficulties and arguments that, after a push and pull, would have gone beyond the mark to the point of forcing her to file a complaint in December 2023. It was precisely the stories of the young model, 23 years old with 1.2 million followers on social media, originally from Riccione, that started the investigations coordinated by the prosecutor of Milan Antonio Pansa and the assistant Letizia Mannella and conducted by the Carabinieri. Investigations that led the thirty-five-year-old Genoese influencer with just over a million followers, to prison for at least twenty episodes of threats and serious harassment for almost a year and a half, to the point of forcing her to change her lifestyle habits due to anxiety and the "ongoing fear of being constantly monitored".
In fact, the investigating judge Anna Magelli writes in her order, Sophie Codegoni, as she herself said, "started not going out alone anymore", avoiding "restaurants that the suspect knows" or frequented by his friends and also "dining or spending time with heterosexual males", due to the constant "fear for her safety". She also started "asking to be taken home by someone or to communicate the time when she will be returning home to some friend". A 'hellish' life for which she also found herself damaged from a professional point of view: in an attempt to disappear from the 'radar' of Basciano, Codegoni at a certain point even stopped posting her images on social media, with all that this entails for a model often called as a testimonial.
And all this because, the judge notes, of a "pervasive, controlling and violent conduct" dictated by "an obsessive jealousy towards the young woman", who the 35-year-old would have "wanted excluded from any relationship" with others, even "after the end", never accepted, of their sentimental history. As evidence of the "alarming dangerousness of the suspect", questioned today by the investigating judge, and of his "complete lack of self-control", there are many contested episodes: starting from July 26 of last year with a "slap in the face" of the model and influencer during a holiday on the Greek island of Mykonos, up to the most serious fact, which led the Prosecutor's Office to request his arrest and which dates back to the night between November 13 and 14 in Milan, when Basciano allegedly first punched a friend of the 23-year-old, smashed the windshield of her car and finally called his ex-partner to tell her that he would come to her house to "kill her".
In the middle, the arguments and her failed attempts to mend their relationship and the decision, again by Sophie Codegoni, to move from Rome to Milan. But the violence and the "continuous death threats" did not stop. As the indictment states, the phrases that were the order of the day and documented were "if you don't come back with me, I'll kill you like a dog", "look out the window, you'll pay for everything", "for me you're dead, you disgust me". Not to mention the intimidations in which he "desperately" expressed his desire to kill himself and then the scene at Milan Fashion Week. For her it was a work appointment: even though he wasn't invited, the DJ showed up at the event where he allegedly swore at her, pulled her "by the dress" and hit her "repeatedly from behind on the inside of her knees, to make her lose her balance". A "totally embarrassing" spectacle, we still read in the documents, in which Basciano "had pushed the security and was forcibly removed from the club", while the model had missed the opportunity to close, by signing it, a contract for a brand.
"My client has been used as a scapegoat for something he did not do and he is very upset," Basciano's lawyer Leonardo D'Erasmo said upon leaving San Vittore prison. "He answered the magistrate for three hours, he gave his version and the evidence on the facts and I am confident that we will soon have important news on this case." Basciano was questioned in front of investigating judge Anna Magelli.
(Online Union)
