ROME — In Italy, sexual harassment is a young woman’s problem.

That is apparently the opinion of Italian prosecutors who have dropped a sexual harassment case against the former leader of the powerful Italian soccer federation because they concluded the woman he allegedly groped was too old to be distressed by his advances.

In a report that came to light Thursday, Roman prosecutors decided that Carlo Tavecchio, once arguably the most powerful man in Italian sport, may have groped Elisabetta Cortani, the president of the female division of the Lazio soccer club, but that she had reported it too late, knew him too well, and been alive too long for the charges to stick.

“Unfortunately, that’s what happened,” said Domenico Mariani, Ms. Cortani’s lawyer, who on Thursday morning filed an objection to the prosecutors’ dismissal of the case. He said that the prosecutors had written that harassment was “incompatible” with the accusation made by Ms. Cortani, 53, because, in part, she was too old to have been intimidated by her accused harasser.

“Maybe I am old for them,” Ms. Cortani, a mother of two, said in an interview Thursday. “But I can assure you that I felt in a position of subordination, I felt afraid. Because being in that room meant being in the heart of Italian soccer. And in that room, subordination and fear have no age.”