Asia Argento has broken down in her first interview since the suicide of her lover Anthony Bourdain, saying: “People say I murdered him, they say I killed him.”
The TV presenter and chef took his own life in a French hotel room three months ago, days after she was pictured strolling hand-in-hand with another man in Rome.
In an emotional interview with DailyMailTV, she admitted that she’d cheated on him, but said: “He cheated on me too.”
She pointed out that he travelled for 265 days a year, leaving ample opportunity to stray, but said that they “took really great pleasure” in each other’s company.
“We are not children, we are grown ups,” she added.
Bourdain, 61, was best-known for his award-winning series Parts Unknown, a food-based travelogue broadcast on CNN.
His celebrity was such that when Barack Obama went to Hanoi, Vietnam, in May 2016, he met him at a casual restaurant for a $6 meal of noodles and grilled pork.
Since his death, internet trolls have made vile claims towards the Italian actress, 43, blaming her for his decision to take his own life. Some branded her a murderer.
“I understand that the world needs to find a reason,” she said. “I would like to find a reason too. I don't have it. Maybe I would feel some solace in thinking there was something that happened.
“I understand that people wanted to blame me because he was so deeply loved and he entered in the hearts of so many people, into their lives, into their hearts.
“So in a way I understand that they see me as the negative person, the destroyer.”
She says she doesn’t see herself as responsible for his death, but said she feels “terrible” that he had “so much pain inside him” and she didn’t see it.
Bourdain once said that he’d never met anyone who wanted to kill themselves as much as he did - until he met Argento.
But she said: “He only told me once that he had dark thoughts.
“Just two months before [he died] it was our anniversary and he wrote to me: "Two years - a miracle, a gift, the best thing that has ever happened. And for me it's the same and nothing, and nobody, will ever take that away from me or him.”
She described the moment she first received the call that he’d been found dead. She was preparing to start her shift in her role as a judge on X Factor in Italy when she was told, causing her to start “screaming at the top of my lungs”.
“I couldn't even cry and then I was on the floor and the maid came in and she told me I was catatonic.
“I thought I could never get up again after this. It felt like I was in the abyss and there was no light anymore. There would never be light again.”
