Mangiata dall’orco e tradita dalle donne’. Vecchi e nuovi media raccontano la vicenda di Asia Argento, tra storytelling e Hate Speech

Re-enacted and dissected in the National and International news, the narration of the rape denounced by Italian actress Asia Argento has triggered several coming outs revealing the violence perpetuated against other actors and actresses by prominent personalities of the Hollywood star system. Textually molded between diffused narration and the blink of a tweet, the story has hooked the public displaying, in the Italian media in particular, a morbid legitimation of Victim Blaming. Asia Argento has become the object of Hate Speech revealing, in turn, a cultural palimpsest of lies and guilty silences deriving from stereotypes represented in comments of the most crass and basest order. The present discussion starts therefore from a quantitative and qualitative analysis of texts, in English and Italian, reporting the story and aims to reveal the similarities and differences between language practices substantiating the discourse of violence. Another corpus derived from the social networks will also reveal the righteous indignant reactions of cybernauts concerning this story which will help identify the language patterns at the core of gender-based violence