Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced on Friday she was separating from her partner, the father of her daughter, after he was recorded making sleazy comments and seemingly admitting to an affair.

“My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which lasted almost ten years, ends here,” Meloni wrote in a message on social media, saying their paths “have diverged for some time”.

The announcement comes after Giambruno, a television presenter, was caught making overtly sexual and sexist comments to female colleagues off-air on the sidelines of his talk show ‘Diario del giorno ‘(Daily diary) on the Rete 4
commercial station.

“How do you do, darling? Do you know that (name redacted) and I are having an affair? All of (television company) Mediaset knows it, and now you do too,”

He is heard telling a woman who is also off camera. “But we’re looking for a third person, as we do threesomes. Foursomes too. Would you like to be part of our working group?” he says in comments broadcast by a different television channel on Tuesday and Thursday.

In another comment, he says: “Can I touch my balls while I talk to you?”

On Friday afternoon, a spokesman for Mediaset, which is owned by the Berlusconi family, told the ANSA news agency Giambruno had been suspended as a presenter while the company looked into the situation.

Meloni, 46, is marking one year in power this weekend at the head of a hard-right government which strongly promotes traditional, conservative family values.

Giambruno, who she met in a broadcast studio while giving an interview, has increasingly become a source of headlines for his controversial comments.

In August, Meloni defended Giambruno after he was accused of victim blaming for remarks he made while discussing two gang rapes this summer that had shocked Italy.

On his talk show, Giambruno, 42, said “if you avoid getting drunk and losing your senses, you might also avoid running into certain problems and coming across a wolf”.

In her post on Friday, Meloni thanked him for “the splendid years we spent together, for the difficulties we went through and for giving me the most important thing in my life, our daughter Ginevra”, who is seven years old.