Anne Hathaway - About Raffaello Follieri

Raffaello Follieri and Anne Hathaway at the Luca Luca fashion show on September 12, 2004. By Brian Prahl/Splashnews.com.

Anne Hathaway Breaks Follieri Silence: "The Rug Was Pulled Out From Under Me"
September 10, 2008 09:48 AM

Actress Anne Hathaway has finally broken her silence over the June arrest of boyfriend Raffaello "Vati-Con" Follieri. She gave an interview to W magazine, on newsstands in LA and New York today. Also today Follieri pled guilty to fraud and money-laundering charges.

Hathaway showed up for the interview looking thin and was on the verge of tears for much of it.

"As soon as I found out about the arrest, I had to get on a plane to Mexico to do a press tour for Get Smart. And then I spent a week in shock at a friend's house. And then I had to go back and do more press, and I haven't stopped since."...

She's been staying at a friend's downtown since moving out of the midtown apartment she shared with Follieri, which was searched by the authorities. "I have to find a place to live," she says numbly. But then her voice catches with emotion and pools form at the corners of her eyes as she struggles to articulate her messy mix of feelings. "It's a situation where the rug was pulled out from under me all of a sudden," she says. "But just as suddenly, my friends threw another rug back under me. One said, 'Go stay at my house.' And Steve Carell [her Get Smart costar] stepped up for me during an interview when someone asked a question [about it]. He said, 'At some point you're going to have to talk about this time in your life. You don't have to do it this week. I'll take care of anything that comes your way.'

"I've been shown such kindness," she continues, wiping at an errant tear. "Not everyone gets that. A lot of people go through tough times alone."

Hathaway has less to say about the beating she's taking in the press. "What's going on is so much bigger than all that," she says. "Though it's crazy that things like that Newsweek article have become small stuff." One eyebrow arches with ironic resignation. She declares that she has no desire to correct any of the misinformation that's padded much of the scandal coverage, though a week later she sends an e-mail addressing a recent Page Six item: "I did not abandon my dog, Esmeralda, and no one had to ask me to go and get her. In fact, the day before that particular news item broke I had arranged to have her picked up and taken to my parents' apartment." (Hathaway's mother, a former stage actress, and her father, a lawyer, also live in Manhattan.) "My dad likes telling the story," the e-mail continues, "in a funny/sad sort of way, that Esmeralda was at [their] house watching herself on Access Hollywood as Nancy O'Dell or someone asked, 'Where in the world is Esmeralda?'"
resource: Huffington Post

Anne Hathaway's Ex Dissected: The Follieri Charade
Vanity Fair | September 4, 2008 11:40 AM

Anne Hathaway had broken up with him--sort of--10 days before. Federal prosecutors were circling, interviewing his associates. And now, on the cusp of 30, Raffaello Follieri was, in a sense, back where he'd started when he moved to Manhattan from Italy five years ago: sleeping on spare beds and scrambling for investors to make his business real.

It was a shocking comedown for the charismatic entrepreneur who'd whisked his actress girlfriend around the world on chartered jets and yachts, who'd stayed in the Dorchester hotel in London, the Ritz in Paris, and the Excelsior in Rome when he wasn't home in the Olympic Tower duplex overlooking Saint Patrick's Cathedral. He'd socialized with some of the world's most powerful people. Yet Follieri was unfazed. Ever confident--a confidence man, federal prosecutors would declare when he was dragged into court the next day--Follieri felt he had only two problems on the evening of June 23, 2008: his sinuses, and arranging his 30th-birthday party for that coming Saturday night at the Villa Verde restaurant on Capri.

The spare bed this time was in the hall of his parents' Trump Tower apartment. Follieri loved the instant status that Trump Tower conferred: he'd started out with a penthouse apartment there when he could ill afford it. When he bagged his first investors, he turned the apartment over to his parents, who spoke almost no English. But now he was sharing it with them because the lease had run out on his Olympic Tower duplex and none of his past or prospective investors, or Hathaway, were inclined to pay the $37,000-a-month rent.
resource: Huffington Post