Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni shared her candid outrage and disgust over a pornography site that featured fake photos of herself and other prolific women, including her own sister, adorned with sexist and offensive captions.
The porn website Phica featured galleries of doctored images before being overloaded with ones featuring Meloni and other high-profile women.
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Images of Meloni and her sister Arianna, a prominent politician within the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, quickly became popular on the site and were viewed by scores of users.
The backlash was almost immediate and the entire platform was swiftly shut down by its own managers, who blamed its hundreds of thousands of users for violating its rules.
Meloni, who ran on a family-first platform and is notoriously vocal about bolstering women’s issues, was abhorred by the disgusting images and said she felt violated by the invasion.
“I am disgusted by what happened, and I want to extend my solidarity and support to all the women who have been offended, insulted, and violated in their intimacy by the managers of this forum and its users,” Meloni told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.
“It is disheartening to note that in 2025, there are still those who consider it normal and legitimate to trample on a woman’s dignity and target her with sexist and vulgar insults, hiding behind anonymity or a keyboard.”
Arianna added that the root cause of the debauchery was a “bad habit of a click-through society” where privacy is a myth and “we belittle the real, important things that women achieve and conquer with their work day after day.”
Italy has a revenge porn law, but Meloni noted that the violating distribution “no longer happens just out of ‘revenge,’ and that protecting our data and our privacy is increasingly crucial in our times.”
The current version of the law, passed in 2019, makes the spread of sexually explicit images punishable by up to six years in prison. It’s unclear if Meloni may aim to update it or seek to introduce newer privacy-oriented legislation.
The porn site images aren’t Meloni’s first bout with such explicit transgressions.
In 2024, she sued a father and son duo who allegedly created a sexually explicit deepfake video of her that was distributed in the United States and viewed “millions of times.” She’s seeking roughly $108,200 in damages, but promised to donate any earnings to a state fund dedicated to women who are victims of violence.
