It's been 10 years since she found herself entangled in a toxic and dangerous relationship. And it took just as much to get through it, to denounce, to forgive. And talk about it, so that those who have experienced the same nightmare as hers find the strength to get through it and get help like she did, no matter how difficult and scary it may be. Speaking about his experience with Vanity Fair her name is Claudia Lagona, aka Levante. “I went there too. I can no longer keep saying that I know how some women feel without admitting it,” she said in a long interview, “time, maturity and even being a mother have helped me to assimilate myself, to no longer be ashamed of who I am. I was. To forgive me. And wanting to come out into the open.” Thus the Sicilian singer, who among others participated in the Sanremo Festival in 2020 and 2023, began her story to raise awareness of gender violence. “Around ten years ago, I I am in love with a man. He was immediately very jealous”, remembers Levante, “in a sort of sick mechanism, I had to justify myself to him. They were signals, his as well as mine . Anyway, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't in love and I told him. Not being able to have me anymore, he got angry.” The man did not resign himself to reality and when the singer-songwriter broke off the relationship, he began blackmailing her and bombarding her with messages. “He tried to blackmail me: he had videos of us, private files. He called me constantly, he sent me 980 emails in a month, or around thirty a day,” she continues, explaining that everyone around her was worried, “I was scared, but maybe not enough, that time. I didn't think he would hurt me, I was more afraid for him.”
The approach ban
Then a lawyer friend convinced her to denounce, but it was not easy: “At one point, I mainly felt shame, a lot of shame. I felt stupid: I didn't know how to handle the situation that had been going on for a few months. » The coldness of the authorities and attempts at minimization made the process even more difficult. “Our world is a world of males who protect males. Finally, they forbade this person from coming near me, for whatever it was worth.” Since then, the man has been heard from time to time. To apologize, to let her know that she received diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that she started a course of psychotherapy. “I don't answer him so he deletes the messages. I just hope that this interview doesn't push him to contact me,” he adds, “now I have forgiven him. I realized that I had not met him in love, but in pain. His and mine. This person also revealed one of my big problems, namely my attachment to a certain type of man: my father.” Her parent died when Lagona was 9 years old and, as far as she remembers, he was not violent, but “he was hard, severe, uncompromising. For a long time, I was fascinated by people who looked like her.” And to those who still insinuate, accuse a woman who denounces violence after so many years, he replies: “You know when, with extreme stupidity, someone one asks: “Ah, why did she think about this twenty years before saying she was raped?” “. Because 19 of them were for forgiving yourself and the last one was for finding courage.”
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