Asia Argento Cover-Up Exposed In Secret Texts With Late Lover Anthony Bourdain
Feb. 25 2019, Updated 11:47 a.m. ET
Anthony Bourdain and Asia Argento orchestrated a cover-up at the same time she was publicly roasting other alleged sex offenders as a self-proclaimed headliner of the #MeToo movement, Breaking Celebrity News Online can confirm.
The hypocrisy is laid bare in a series of previously reported texts exchanged between the late Parts Unknown host and his actress girlfriend.
Breaking Celebrity News has confirmed the texts are legitimate through independent sources — as well as how Bourdain and Argento referred to her underage accuser as "donkey."
Argento and Bourdain's communications are undated, but appear to follow a notice of intent to sue filed in November of 2017 by lawyers acting on behalf of former child actor Jimmy Bennett.
Bennett claims Argento sexually assaulted him in a room at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, Calif. on May 9, 2013, roughly two months after his 17th birthday.
Argento was 37. California's legal age of sexual consent is 18 years old.
In discussing a payout to head off Bennett's lawsuit, Bourdain reassured Argento a payment is, "no admission of anything, no attempt to buy a cover up, simply an offer to help an obviously tortured soul whose desperate and trying to jack you for money."
“Or,” Bourdain then added, “you just tell him to f**k himself. Either way, I am with you."
In the messages, Bourdain — who committed suicide in June — also seemingly responded to Argento's concerns over how shady she felt for shelling out de facto hush money to an accuser while excoriating disgraced Hollywood mega producer Harvey Weinstein for doing the same.
"You are not buying silence," the ex-CNN host reassured Argento. "Only freedom from inconvenience. And to help a 'poor twisted goof' get his life together."
Asia responds, "I will never buy his silence for something that isn't true since I am also broke."
"I don't fear him Bennett," she added. " I am no Puritan, google my a**."
Argento was among the dozen-plus women who accused Weinstein of abusing his position of authority through sexual harassment and assault.
In October, she said Weinstein raped her at France's Cannes Film Festival in 1997 when she was 21 — and in the months that followed, she took a vocal position at the forefront of the #MeToo movement.
However, Bennett claimed in legal papers Argento abused her own position of authority with her assault.
He claimed in legal papers that his relationship with the Italian director, now 42, was "that a mother-son relationship had blossomed from their experience on set together.”
Bennett was only seven years old when he appeared in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a 2004 film Argento directed, starred in and co-wrote.
Their relationship, by their own accounts and social media posts viewed by Breaking Celebrity News, continued during the ensuing years, culminating in the 2013 alleged assault.
But Bennett’s lawyer, Gordon K. Sattro, has said the former child actor only decided to file a notice of his intent to sue Argento after getting fed up with her holier-than-thou attitude toward Weinstein.