Photographer who shot Anthony Bourdain's girlfriend Asia Argento's pictures with French reporter regrets selling them
Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain's suicide has become the latest talk of the town, and in a guilty state, Rino Barillari, the photographer who captured Bourdain's girlfriend Asia Argento's pictures hugging a French reporter has come forward and said that he regrets selling off the pictures to media outlets.
Barillari's guilt might have stemmed from the fact that Argento's lover Bourdain committed suicide only five days after the pictures of Argento dancing in a Roman restaurant with French reporter Hugo Clément went live via an Italian magazine called Chi.
“If I had known, I would have stopped,” the photographer told La Verità. “A picture is not worth a life. If that shot triggered suicide... this would make me suffer.”
28-year-old Clément had accompanied Argento to the speech she made at the 'Cannes Film Festival' in May, where she had revealed in her speech that “In 1997, I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here.” Barillari clicked the two dancing after dinner at Ristorante Camponeschi. “Everyone looked at them,” he told the publication in his statement. “She looked like a possessed doll . . . a scene of crazy sensuality.”
According to Barillari, when Argento realized she and Clément had been photographed, she asked him to delete the photos, something which he now wishes he had done in order to save the celebrity chef, who reportedly committed suicide in his hotel room in France where he was shooting an episode of his CNN show.
However, recently, Bourdain's close friend Rose McGowan released a statement where she urged fans of the late chef to stop putting the blame on his girlfriend for his troubled state of mind and the eventual suicide.
“I know before Anthony died he reached out for help, and yet he did not take the doctor’s advice,” she wrote in an open letter published “at the behest” of Asia Argento which came out on Monday.
“Anthony’s internal war was his war, but now she’s been left on the battlefield to take the bullets. It is in no way fair or acceptable to blame her or anyone else, not even Anthony,” McGowan wrote. And in a bid to keep the blame away from Asia, she even shared about the couple's relationship in her open letter.
“When Anthony met Asia, it was instant chemistry. They laughed, they loved and he was her rock during the hardships of this last year,” she wrote, adding that the couple “loved without borders of traditional relationships, and they established the parameters of their relationship early on. Asia is a free bird, and so was Anthony.”
She continued, “I’ve heard from many that the past two years they spent together were some of his happiest and that should give us all solace.”