My name is Filomena Lamberti, I am from Salerno. When I was 16 I met Vittorio, blue eyes, blond hair. I fell in love with him... my prince charming.
I was a cheerful abd happy girl with lots of friends. Then Vittorio and I got engaged. I was so much in love with him that when he broke up with me once, I felt so bad that I tried to commit suicide.
But in the end we got married and had three children that I tried to educate as best I could.
But he used to isolate me, he used to humiliate me, he used to beat me. Terror filled my whole life.
Prohibitions were our daily routine, mine and my children's. To control me, he forced me to work with him in the fish market. I was alone, financially dependent on him and deprived of any freedom.
At a certain point I couldn't take it any more and I decided to take my life back. I told: "Vittorio - I want to leave you". A few hours later, in the night, he wakes me up and says ‘look what I'm going to give you’, it's sulphuric acid.
Everything burns, even my soul. I ask my son Pasquale for help, the acid had corroded my whole head. While we ran to the hospital, in the car, I cursed him, I shouted ‘Vittorio, why?’ And I'm still saying it today, ‘why?’

But I had only one thought in my head, I got rid of him! My ordeal began at the Cardarelli burn centre. Five years of hospitalisation, 30 surgeries, disfigured, violated.
During the trial he presented a letter of excuse for a plea bargain. Excuses? Except that some time later, in front of the cameras, he declares that he would do it again.
The trial ends not even a month later. Aggression, that was the sentence. Domestic violence and grievous bodily harm. A sentence for a misdemeanour.
Unbelievable celerity. No lawyer, no judge, no one ever questioned me, never called me. The case was closed and could never be reopened.
For me it was a wound that never healed. When he got out, after 18 months, which became 15 months for good behaviour, I was still in intensive care unit. Since then I've been living with a thousand difficulties to survive until the end of the month.
It's hard, very hard... but I got my life back.
In this story the judiciary lost, justice lost, all the people who didn't want to see, and who could have help me, lost.

But I won. At great personal price I took my life back.

Because it is never too late to be a free woman.