Suicide following years of humiliation online stuns Italy

Tiziana Cantone had already tried to take her own life twice before her third and final attempt, her mother said.

The 31-year-old was a "sensitive" girl who - despite moving home, changing her name and fighting through the courts to have the videos removed from the internet - could not escape the notoriety caused by the sex tape she featured in.

"She was hurting and at times took refuge in alcohol. But she was always a healthy and normal girl," her mother Maria Teresa told investigators, La Reppublica newspaper reported.

Tiziana had won a "right to be forgotten" ruling - but could not understand why the court had ordered her to pay €20,000 (£17,000; $22,500) in legal costs.

By then it was much too late - the video had been copied and republished thousands of times.

"She was suffering from everything she saw and heard and in particular from the outcome of the legal proceedings because she believed justice had not been done," her mother said.

Her mother has been joined in grief by many Italians - but not all.

Some continued to condemn her, such as Walter Caputo, a Turin city councillor for the Democratic Party of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Mr Caputo wrote on Facebook that Tiziana had in sending the video to acquaintances perhaps been "aiming for a certain notoriety" and was "certainly not a saint".

Mr Caputo later apologised for the remarks, which he said had been poorly considered, Fanpage.it website reported.

Author Roberto Saviano said the hostility towards Tiziana stemmed from what he described as Italy's "morbid" relationship with sex.

"I grieve for Tiziana, who killed herself because she was a woman in a country where uninhibited and playful sex is still the worst of sins," he wrote on Twitter.

Another commenter suggested that had Tiziana been a man - "if she were called Tiziano" - she would still be alive because men having sex do not attract the same kind of scandalised reaction.

One mourner at her funeral said she was surprised by how few men had attended.

"There were many women and very few men and this thing made me feel really bad," she told reporters.

Tiziana's suicide came just as friends thought she was finally putting the episode behind her.

"I wonder how anyone can be so fierce, how to rage against a girl who has not done anything wrong," Teresa Petrosino told Corriere della Sera.

"I think that they should be ashamed, all those who have filled the web of insults and meanwhile secretly watched the images."

(BBC)