Italian news presenter sues over having to share room with flatulent co-worker

Dania Mondini, the RAI anchorwoman, is taking the Italian national broadcaster to court over what has become a four-year long scandal. Photo / Twitter / Dania Mondini

As the Italian equivalent of the BBC, it commands authority and respect, but there is a sulphurous whiff of unrest in the corridors and studios of the country's state broadcaster.

A prominent television presenter has accused bosses at the RAI network of forcing her to share a room with a colleague with chronic flatulence – or as she delicately put it in a formal complaint, "noisy, repeated and malodorous bodily emissions".

Dania Mondini said the colleague, who has not been publicly named, was also a prodigious burper.

She claims that managers' insistence that she share a room with the man was part of a campaign of intimidation against her as a result of professional rivalry.

When she demanded to be moved to another room because of the unwelcome emissions, her treatment by managers became worse – she was assigned "banal" news reading assignments and subjected to "verbal aggression", she said.

Two other journalists also complained about the malodorous colleague, saying they too could no longer bear to share with him.

Managers allegedly told them they would lose their jobs, with one commenting: "Any journalist who refuses to be in a room with him should be kicked up the a***."

Mondini took the public broadcaster to court. The case, as so often in Italy's ossified judicial system, has turned into a tortuous legal saga.

It has already dragged on for four years but has come to light again after prosecutors ordered fresh investigations into the complaints.

Case takes mafia-style twist

"Not even in the saucy comedies of the 1970s could we have imagined reading what is being reported from the precious studios of the national broadcaster, amid sniggers, winks, nudges of the elbow and gastrointestinal problems," one Italian commentator wrote on Wednesday.

The persistent "chemical attacks" by one colleague towards another had got the whole country talking, wrote Maurizio De Caro in Affari Italiani.

The case has now taken a new twist, with claims that the flatulent broadcaster had inappropriate contacts with a convicted mafia boss from the Ndrangheta', the organised crime network based in Calabria in southern Italy. The investigation continues.