She’s avoided the slammer — but can she go back to a life of glitz and glamour?
One of the world’s biggest fashion influencers has been cleared of aggravated fraud in an Italian court; however, her PR nightmare is far from over.
Chiara Ferragni — a 38-year-old bombshell blond who boasts more than 28 million Instagram followers and has been dubbed the “Kim Kardashian of Italy” — was accused of pocketing vast amounts of cash while selling Christmas cakes and Easter eggs marketed for charity.
On Wednesday, following a fast-tracked trial in Milan, a judge found Ferragni and two other defendants not guilty, with the beauty avoiding jail time of up to five years.
“I had faith in justice, and justice has been done,” the exonerated influencer told reporters outside court, adding that it marked “the end of a nightmare that lasted two years.”
However, the influencer shouldn’t get too ahead of herself.
Ferragni’s image has been severely tarnished by the accusations, and she’s said to have lost 90% of her brand’s reported $87.5 million value.
“She could start again from the ground up,” crisis PR guru Lauren Beeching told The Post last fall, saying she could rebrand her tone from glitz and glamor to realism if she wants to reestablish her tattered reputation.
Italy’s golden girl
Ferragni has been famous in her home country for more than 15 years, first garnering online attention with a blog back in 2009.
She started showcasing her flashy lifestyle as a student, eventually earning enough attention to drop out of law school to focus on influencing full-time.
“She’s the biggest ‘It’ girl in Italy, literally a household name, and she has a huge walk-in closet with hundreds of Chanel bags,” Sophie Ross Brooks, co-host of the influencer-tracking “Snark Bait” podcast, previously told The Post. “And they’re not even organized, just haphazardly thrown together. It’s, like, ‘Omigod, she’s so rich she doesn’t even have to worry about storing her Chanel bags carefully.’ ”
In 2018, Ferragni wed Italian rapper Fedez in a lavish ceremony meticulously documented on Instagram and featured in American Vogue. The couple subsequently had two children, who also became fixtures on her uber-popular social media accounts. (They separated in 2024).
Through the couple’s earnings, Ferragni built up a property portfolio — including a Milanese penthouse and a country retreat on Lake Como. Amazon Prime Italy tapped her entire family to anchor “The Ferragnez,” a hit “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”-style show about the beauty and her extended family, including her two lookalike sisters, Valentina and Francesca.
By the end of 2022, her retail company Fenice Srl — offering women’s clothing, jewelry, kidswear, furniture and more — was worth around $87.5 million.
Ferragni also became a fixture at New York Fashion Week, posting pictures of herself sitting front row at coveted catwalk shows, cozying up to Karlie Kloss and “The Real Housewives of New York” star Rebecca Minkoff, and using landmarks like the Empire State Building as backdrops in enviable Instagram snaps shared with social media fans.
It seemed she was unstoppable.
Fall from grace
For Christmas 2022, Ferragni announced a collaboration with the baked-goods company Balocco to sell a special festive cake, or pandoro, for charity.
It was three times pricier than a regular version, but Ferragni claimed that the proceeds would go to support the Regina Margherita Children’s Hospital in Turin, Italy.
Almost immediately, Italian media were suspicious and, before the end of the year, had published damning allegations.
Balocco had donated some money to the hospital — $58,000 — albeit long before the cake went on sale. As for Ferragni, she reportedly pocketed a cool million for her endorsement, or around 20 times what went to the sick kids.
An alleged fraud was repeated around a similar scheme with an Easter egg maker, where only $41,650 of the $1.39 million that Ferragni and the manufacturer reportedly earned went to charity
Italian authorities began investigating and eventually charged her with aggravated fraud. She earned the dubious legacy of a statute change named in her dishonor: the Ferragni Law, which threatens fines on any charitable product that doesn’t make clear the exact percentage that will go to a good cause.
Ferragni issued an apology immediately after the controversies emerged, pledging to donate 1 million euros to the children’s hospital in Turin that was involved in the Pandoro initiative. She also paid the 1.2 million euros to the organization involved in the Easter egg scandal.
During a court appearance in November, the influencer said: “Everything we have done, we have done in good faith; none of us has profited.
However, she admitted that she had made a “communication error.”
Rebuild and rebrand?
A judge may have cleared Ferragani, but her public image will take time to rebuild.
While it won’t be an easy feat, other big names have managed to rebrand and recover from public scandals.
Barton Consulting’s Winston Chesterfield says scandal can sometimes humanize famous figures who tout their too-good-to-be-true lives. For instance, Jude Law’s messy private life didn’t preclude him from scoring Dior Homme and Brioni deals, among others.
“It depends on how serious it is, but luxury needs real characters — it can’t rely on models — so the idea brands don’t want to be associated with any kind of controversy? It’s not really true,” he told The Post. “Strong women who rise up again like a phoenix from the ashes get rewarded again.”
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