A former tennis Italian tennis player who was accused of fleeing Italy’s authorities for tax evasion has returned to her home country.
Camila Giorgi, 33, achieved a career-high ranking of No 26 in the world in 2018 before retiring in May last year to become a lingerie model.
Now, she has been seen in her native Italy again as she was on the red carpet for the 82nd edition of the Venice International Film Festival over the weekend.
She was seen sporting a white dress with a gold-sequin pattern and silver hoop earrings at the event.
It followed her first forays into modelling in 2021, which saw her upload a series of pictures to her Instagram account that year.
Outside her social media activity – including a Christmas Eve dessert-making masterclass, clad in a red satin dress, that has been viewed more than a million times – Giorgi has barely been seen since she retired without fanfare last year amid accusations of tax evasion and unpaid rent in her native Italy.
A former tennis Italian tennis player who was accused of fleeing Italy’s authorities for tax evasion has returned to her home country
Camila Giorgi, 33, achieved a career-high ranking of No 26 in the world in 2018 before retiring in May last year to become a lingerie model
Now, she has been seen in her native Italy again as she was on the red carpet for the 82nd edition of the Venice International Film Festival
It came in curious circumstances, with the owner of a villa Giorgi and her family had been renting in Calenzano, a town on the outskirts of Florence, claiming she had unexpectedly upped sticks with six months’ rent outstanding and removed valuable items of furniture from the property.
Giorgi denied the accusations during an appearance on the Italian chat show Verissimo last October, describing the claims as laughable.
‘The house had no furniture and we always paid the rent,’ she said. ‘The news made me laugh.’
Giorgi also poured cold water on suggestions that she had ‘fled’ to the US – ‘It was not an escape,’ she insisted, ‘I moved to America permanently with my parents’ – and said her retirement simply coincided with the conclusion of an investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, an Italian law enforcement agency that deals with financial crime.
She claimed that alleged gaps in her tax returns were down to a lawyer with whom she no longer had dealings.
‘The problems with the tax authorities? My family did not know about them, said Giorgi. ‘They were created by outside people who managed me.’
The abrupt nature of Giorgi’s departure from the game undoubtedly did little to burnish her public image.
Even the WTA, the governing body of the women’s game, struggled to corroborate claims of her retirement after her name appeared on the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s list of retired players.
Giorgi was accused of failing to pay rent and removing ‘half the furniture’ from a rented villa in Calenzano, near Florence last year. She has since denied the claims on an Italian TV show
When the Italian donned a red satin dress to perform a Christmas Eve desert-making masterclass on her Instagram channel last year, the video was viewed 1.2 million times
Giorgi’s foray into the world of modelling may have raised eyebrows in the tennis community, but quirks and controversies have long been the Italian’s calling card
But there too Giorgi mounted a robust defence, explaining that she left the sport because she was exhausted and simply ‘couldn’t travel any more’.
She also said a planned retirement announcement had been blown out of the water by the publication of the ITIA list.
It all made for an eventful conclusion to a tennis career that began when Giorgi, who has two brothers, Leandro and Amadeus – Antonela, her younger sister, died tragically in a car accident in Paris in 2011 – first picked up a racket as a five-year-old.
Private sponsors who claimed they had invested in her potential on the understanding they would be repaid through her future earnings aired their grievances in an article published by Sports Illustrated.
Both Giorgi and her father Sergio, an Argentine of Italian descent who was also her coach, denied the accusations, which came just months after an eye-catching run to the last 16 of the US Open in 2013.
Pressed on the claims after defeating Maria Sharapova in Indian Wells the following spring, Giorgi replied: ‘I just want to talk about tennis, not this stuff.’
Sergio, meanwhile, who was drafted to fight in the Falklands war in 1982, attributed the allegations to bitterness on the part of a disgruntled coach who had harboured ambitions of training his daughter.
