This Wednesday, after decades as a talk show host, Mediaset is giving up Alessandro Lecquio. According to sources close to the decision, the talk show host was fired from the program on which he now collaborated. We see, by Ana Rosa Quintana’s production company Unicorn Content, and broadcast in the morning Telecinco. The reason: the abuse that Antonia Dell’Atte, his ex-wife and mother of his first child, reported to this newspaper just over a month ago, as this newspaper has learned. Immediately after the publication of the interview in which the former model and presenter recounted in detail the violence suffered by Lecquio when they were married, at the end of the 80s, Mediaset prepared to study how to behave, there were contacts both with Dell’Atte and with his lawyer and in the last month there was a meeting between the lawyer and the company and this same Wednesday between the company and the production company.
The decision came in less than 24 hours, after Mediaset’s examination of all the judicial documentation that the former model’s lawyer handed over in the case that Lecquio opened against Dell’Atte for calling him an “aggressor” in public, which happened more than 20 years ago. Because the violence that Dell’Atte told EL PAÍS last October was not a secret.
It was also decades, the same ones that Lecquio sat on televisions, that she was known by colleagues, journalists and anyone who had seen the many times in which Dell’Atte had called him an “aggressor”, as well as recounting some episodes of violence. For this reason, in January 2004, Lecquio sued her for defamation and she prepared her defense with the lawyer Cristina Almeida.
“Justice established that I wasn’t lying when I called him a molester,” and so he reported it in 1991, only to later withdraw it, Dell’Atte recalled in the interview. And this can also be read in the order of the court number 35 of Madrid of July of the same year, in which the magistrate specifies that “veritatis exception is deemed sufficient” to dismiss the case; that is, that Dell’Atte’s statement and the evidence provided for that trial were sufficient to demonstrate that she had not lied in describing him as an abuser.
That order, along with other dossiers, was the last legal act that sources close to Mediaset assure that the company should have met with Ana Rosa Quintana, the owner of the production company of the program where Lecquio works, and reach an agreement that was “100% consensual”, according to the same sources.
Meanwhile, in recent weeks, the talk show host has been at the center of comments and debates on several entertainment programs, including the one he works on, even without taking any position regarding violence or any explicit question.
In the aftermath of the publication of the interview with Dell’Atte, Lequio spoke on the program in which he worked until this Wednesday about the words of the former model: “I have referred Antonia Dell’Atte’s statements to my lawyer for the relevant legal treatment”. Afterwards the set fell silent. Nobody said anything. And then Lecquió added: “Everything has already been said. Whoever has to solve the rest.”
The presenter, Patricia Pardo, invited the other speakers to comment, but neither Cristina Tàrrega, nor Alejandra Rubio, nor Pepe del Real, nor Marisa Martín Blázquez, nor Kike Calleja did so. There was some babbling and little else. Telecinco, also questioned after the interview by this newspaper, replied that she had no comments to make. Until this Wednesday. From tomorrow Alessandro Lecquio will no longer sit on that set.
