“Now I am evaluating with the lawyer and the union how to deal with the provision. I’m calm, I can say this. I’m happy to be at the Salone, no one can take that away from me. I only told the truth.” The journalist Serena Bortone arrives at the Arena Robinson, Repubblica’s space at the Turin Book Fair and even though she is here to present her first novel everyone expects answers from her on the affair that sees her as the protagonist of the clash with Rai, the the company that sent her a “letter of clarification”, initiating disciplinary action against her for having published on social media on 20 April a post contrary to company policy and damaging to Rai’s image.
At one in the morning, Bortone wrote a comment on Massimo Giannini’s chat on April 25th for those who were expressing solidarity with her, triggered by the spread of the news of the disciplinary measure that had reached her: “Thanks for your solidarity, I have listened to a lot of lies, really a lot”. But at the Salon for this appointment which should have been peaceful and satisfying, she prefers to close all communication on the point, worried about the possible repercussions of her statement outside the context for which she obtained authorization to give interviews. “I wouldn’t want to talk about the story for a simple reason – she says smiling – I was authorized by the company to give an interview about this book”.
The journalist, who has also received the support of Rai president Marinella Soldi, does not intend to say much more at a particularly tense moment. She escapes the microphones except to be the protagonist of the Turin event in the guise of a writer, and to talk about her book. “My first novel is a story that was inside me and I lived when I was a teenager. At that moment we all feel insecure and fragile.” “But if I had to take a stand I did it even as a girl. Perhaps this is why I could never have married fascism,” she adds. The novel ‘To you so sweet’ is an autobiographical story set in 1980s Rome in which she also addresses the theme of gender transition.
“It’s a true story that is part of my adolescence. I liked bringing to life the years of disengagement of Reagan’s hedonism, the years in which we believed we were capable of anything. In bourgeois Rome in the 1980s, a transgender boy was truly invisible at the time.”
