An Italian Facebook page where thousands of men posted intimate images of their female partners, sisters and unknown women – many of them without their consent, has been closed down following public outrage and multiple complaints to police.
Since it was launched in 2019, hundreds of thousands of photos of women were posted on the Facebook group “Mia Moglie” (My Wife) for the purpose of eliciting comments and propositions by the nearly 32,000 mostly male group members.
The posts ranged from swinger couples to photos women shared with their partners who then posted them on the site. Many photos were taken during sex acts, and most were published without the consent of the women pictured, according to Italy’s Postal Police, which is responsible for digital law enforcement.
More than 2,000 complaints have been filed to Meta and local Italian authorities since Mia Moglie began, according to Italy’s Postal Police, who launched a criminal investigation that led Meta to shut the page down definitively August 20.
“All the comments will be filed in our information system,” Barbara Strappato, deputy director of the Roman Postal Police, said Wednesday, announcing its closure. “The crimes range from defamation to the dissemination of intimate material without consent. I admit that I have never seen such disturbing phrases in a social media group before. Our office worked 24 hours (a day) to block the page. We received more than a thousand reports in just a few hours. What happened is very serious.”
The last post before the page was taken down was an invitation to join the group on a new format, likely Telegram, Strappato said. “We’ve just created a new private and secure group,” the administrators, who have not been named, posted. “Goodbye, and f**k you moralists.”
The closure of the group page came after several formal complaints to Facebook’s owner Meta, instigated by the feminist activist and author Carolina Capria. She posted on her Instagram page that she had also filed a complaint with the Postal Police. “There are dozens of groups where people exchange photos of women (wives, girlfriends, sisters, sisters-in-law, strangers). I visited several yesterday, flagged by you,” she posted, referring to the response to her original post in which she shared a screen grab of the Mia Moglie group showing tens of thousands of members and the page name with three red hearts.
Among the most disturbing entries were men offering photos of their wives for money, police said, including one that listed a woman by age, weight, breast size and their number of sexual partners. Some commentators complimented her breasts, while others said they wished she was wearing a thong, police said.
“Put your hands between her thighs and see if she wakes up,” one commenter wrote, according to information shared with the public by the police, alluding to the fact that the victim was asleep when the photo was taken.
A spokesperson for Meta Italy said the site had been removed for “violating our policies against the sexual exploitation of adults,” in a statement shared by the Postal Police.
“We do not allow content that threatens or promotes sexual violence, sexual abuse, or sexual exploitation on our platforms,” the Meta statement said. “If we become aware of content that incites or advocates rape, we may disable the groups and accounts that post it and share this information with law enforcement.”
The case has prompted comparisons with France’s gang rape case involving Dominique Pelicot, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison last year for drugging, raping and inviting strangers to rape his then-wife, Gisele Pelicot.
In an online comment to CNN, Capria said that the Mia Moglie example underscored how the Pelicot case was not an anomaly, and warned that there are many more sites like it.
Mia Moglie is not the first such sexually exploitative site removed by Italian authorities from social media. A group called “Dipreisti” which has nearly 16,000 members among them people seeking sexual favors in exchange for nude photos of women, has been shut down a dozen times and has been renamed and resurfaced on WhatsApp and Telegram, all tied to an OnlyFans paid site, the Postal Police said.
Because members can sign up anonymously using pseudonyms, it is difficult to press charges without the site administrators’ assistance. “Dipreisti was previously called “La Bibbia 5.0”(the Bible 5.0, il Vangelo del Pelo (Gospel of Hair) and Stupro tua Sorella (Raped Sister), police said, adding that since 2024 there has been a dramatic increase in reports related to pornographic groups on Telegram. “Channels revive faster than closures,” Strappato added.
Italy does have a “revenge porn” law in place, passed in 2019, that makes the “illegal dissemination of sexually explicit images” punishable by up to six years in prison. Many of the sites show up on Telegram, which has not been cooperative in helping crack down on the crime, police said. “Regarding Telegram, we’ve noticed a lack of cooperation from them with law enforcement. This is because they claim not to hold their users’ data, unlike other platforms,” Strappato told La Repubblica newspaper.
“Citizens can report illicit groups to the Postal Police, but without truly effective internal removal tools, the results remain temporary. Until developers introduce procedures capable of eliminating channels, bots, mirrors, and cloud services – and immediately blocking accounts that recreate them – any ban will only be a temporary stopgap.”
Once the Postal Police have completed their extensive investigation into Mia Moglie, which includes reaching out to women they can identify, they will hand the case to the Rome prosecutor’s office to determine what, if any, charges to file.
