Piero Marrazzo was a guest of Mara Venier on Domenica In. The journalist, in a long interview, told part of the story behind the case in which he was involved 15 years ago, revealing the reasons that led him to write a book in which he reveals an important secret about his family.
In the episode of Sunday In on October 20th, after the usual talk dedicated to Dancing with the Stars, Mara Comer conducted a long and intense interview with Piero Marrazzo. The former journalist and politician, 15 years after the case that overwhelmed him and changed his life forever, returned to TV to talk about History without heroesthe book he wrote to tell not only the legal story of which he was the victim, but also to reveal a discovery regarding his family that deeply shocked him.
Piero Marrazzo’s interview with Domenica In
“You were a victim, this must be said” thus Mara Venier begins her interview with Piero Marrazzo, introducing the book that the journalist wrote and which tells the story which for 15 years was recognized as “the Marrazzo Case”:
I was a victim of that pollution that sometimes starts from the web, I thought I would have been arrested, destroyed by addictions, those who knew me know that this wasn’t the issue, I had deaths blamed on me. Today I am allowed to talk to you on a show like this, I was a victim, but also a victim of fake news.
On the cover of History Without Heroes, there is a Piero Marrazzo in his early twenties: “I was a boy who still didn’t know life well and I believed some things that I don’t believe in today. You don’t have to trust everyone“. At that time he had the genuineness and courage to act on his behalf:
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The other side which is what helps you move forward in life, if you throw your heart over the obstacle you don’t think about the bad things that can happen to you. Being here in a company that has been home for 40 years means successes that I have not been able to defend at certain moments in my life.
The beginning of the Marrazzo case
It was 2009 when Piero Marrazzo, then president of the Lazio Region, was filmed in intimate attitudes with a transsexual woman. That video will change his life forever, forcing him to resign from his political position, overwhelmed by a scandal for which he is fiercely criticized by public opinion:
After 15 years, enough, don’t go fishing for what isn’t true. Taking responsibility is important, with whom I had to take responsibility, my wife and my daughters, who were about to be overwhelmed by a tsunami, I had to pick them up and take them away, but I didn’t. In these 15 years everyone could have gone looking for the truths and they didn’t, in the book I wanted to indulge in how I lived, I wanted to tell you how I experienced this division between the public man who continued to go straight and do what he had to do and the private man.
The news of the incident appears in all the newspapers, the journalist was followed by some plainclothes carabinieri, who documented everything, but he didn’t know he would be filmed. What happened in that apartment became public knowledge, which is why over the years Marrazzo developed the idea of having to also provide his own version, without ever shaking off his responsibilities:
The prime minister, Berlusconi, calls me, a very correct call, he tells me that a video had arrived, he brings to my attention that everything is finishing. I always feel the need to talk, but I can’t talk. I owed it to all of you, even to the institutions. I hadn’t done anything illegal, but politics sometimes requires taking responsibility, I hadn’t reported these people and this wasn’t right either. In the 5 years in which I have been regional president, I have never had a warning for extortion, to give the figure of how I worked.
The private individual, as has often happened in the lives of political figures, undermined the public figure and at the time created a scandal which triggered the immediate reaction of public opinion:
I have been a client of sex workers of transsexual women, simple, we should broaden it to those who find pleasure in doing something, it is a pleasure that the moment you do it is the result of your personal sensations. And the loneliness that, I often believe, men experience when they go with a prostitute, today there is a sociolinguistic Vera Gheno, this helps more to understand and not create misunderstandings. The theme is to say transsexual woman or woman, that was one of the key elements of the case.
Marrazzo’s daughters participated in the book
The journalist tells how, once he knew what was about to happen, he could have protected his daughters, but instead he didn’t and this was a great regret. But years later, it was they who wanted to actively participate in the story of that part of their lives:
I didn’t write it to rewrite this part of my life, because it allowed me to start a journey, because when you fall, all the people, never say or make people think that when you fall it’s over, I fell and thanks to my daughters, I have moved on. This book with that fall, I perhaps understood that I had a mission, I had to tell the story of my family. At a certain point in the writing of the book, my daughters told me we would like to say something, everyone has written something. They didn’t give me any concessions, thank goodness, but then they started to say “why when someone falls, the only solution they have is to commit suicide?” and again when they said “you didn’t understand the pain you made us feel” they immediately bullying, pressure.
Marrazzo explains that, thanks to the support of his children, and also of the director of the series in which it was published, he succeeded in this undertaking: “I wrote this book thanks to women, to my three daughters, to Chiara Valerio, to a psychoanalyst, the first time I went to her, she told me to write a book for those who are not yet on their feet like she is.” After 15 years, asks Mara Venier, if she can finally say she has overcome everything:
Unfortunately this book is dedicated to my brother, who passed away a month ago. I have entered another phase of my life, all this, after I wrote it, now yes. I have freed myself, I am here and I can talk, there is nothing to convey, I am someone who has lived an experience.
The discovery of a family secret
Once he returned to Rai, in search of his identity, Piero Marrazzo embarked on a journey in search of his origins, discovering unpublished aspects of his past, especially around the figure of his Italian-American mother, which are collected in the book he published :
I begin a journey, believing I know everything about my mother, to obtain an American passport that I was entitled to, but as luck would have it, Gina, my mother, comes upon me at a certain point. “There’s something in your mother’s life,” the psychoanalyst told me once, but with all I was thinking about, I hadn’t dwelled on it.
Curiosity and perhaps even destiny lead him to discover a secret that had never been confessed by his mother in many years and which turns out to be strangely connected to his experience:
I start a search, my mother had had two marriages, but above all my brother had had a father, whose traces had been lost, I receive a name, a surname and a marriage certificate, in Manhattan, something very similar to what happened to me. The consequence is that a man, my brother’s father, because of his sexual orientation, this man is deprived of the paternity of my brother, who he will never know for his entire life.
