‘Pandoro-gate’: the sweet treat scandal that rocked Italy

Chiara Ferragni, Italy’s most famous influencer, has been cleared of aggravated fraud following one of the country’s most high-profile celebrity trials, dubbed “Pandoro-gate”.

“The nightmare is over,” Ferragni said, after the “long-running scandal involving a charity Christmas cake” came to an end yesterday in a Milan courtroom, said the BBC.

‘Italian Kardashian’

Ferragni is an “O.G. fashion blogger turned influencer turned Italian Kardashian,” said Puck. Her blog, The Blonde Salad, which she started in 2009, “occupied an outsize portion of the industry’s collective consciousness”.

The first fashion influencer to “really make it”, Ferragni secured front-row seats at Milan Fashion Week, appeared on magazine covers and built a “multimillion-dollar business” selling her own products. In 2017, Forbes named her the world’s foremost fashion influencer.

However, more recently, Ferragni found herself in a harsher spotlight. She was accused of misleading her 28 million Instagram followers over a charity fundraiser involving pandoro, a brioche-style Veronese cake typically eaten by Italian families at Christmas.

In 2022 and 2023, “Ferragni partnered with Italian confectioner Balocco to market limited edition Pandoro ‘Pink Christmas’ cakes”, said CNN. The advertising campaign “suggested proceeds would go to the Regina Margherita children’s hospital in Turin” to support cancer research. However, it later emerged that the charitable donation was a €50,000 flat fee paid by Balocco to the hospital prior to the launch of the pandoro, while “the proceeds of the cakes would go directly to Ferragni”, in addition to a €1 million payment to two of her companies for sponsorship of the campaign.

When her fast-tracked trial began in November, prosecutors requested a 20-month prison sentence, alleging that the marketing of the campaign was deliberately misleading. Ferragni denied the charges, telling the court “everything we have done, we have done in good faith”, but she acknowledged that she had made a “communication error”.

Redemption arc

On Wednesday, she and two co-defendants were acquitted of criminal wrongdoing. But “most of the damage” had already been done before the case came to court, said Forbes. Ferragni has already paid a fine of €1.1 million to Italy’s antitrust authority, in addition to various other settlements , and her companies have been “bleeding millions”.

Pandoro-gate has already had legal ramifications. In 2024, the Italian government passed new legislation, dubbed the Ferragni law, imposing greater transparency requirements for influencers with more than one million followers promoting charity fundraisers.

The drama has “political” overtones, too, said Politico. Ferragni and her former husband, the rapper Fedez (real name Federico Lucia), were “famous for taking on progressive causes” and “pitting themselves against the more traditionalist Catholic mainstream” represented by conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

As soon as the scandal broke, Meloni singled out Ferragni as the “wrong kind of role model”, criticising influencers “who make loads of money promoting expensive panettoni that are supposedly for charity”. Since his marriage to Ferragni “collapsed” under the “scrutiny” of the scandal, Fedez has “made an eye-catching lurch to engaging the political right”.

As for Ferragni, there could still be a “Martha Stewart–esque redemption arc in her future”, said Puck. The US lifestyle guru “did six months” in prison for her part in an insider trading scheme. She “emerged slightly humbled” and then “went on to amass more clout than ever”.