“For us, defending women is a priority and it always has been,” Mr. Berlusconi, who was cleared of soliciting underage prostitutes but is still fighting charges that he bribed a witness, said in a recent television interview.

That is not to suggest that the 81-year-old, whose girlfriend is nearly 50 years his junior, has changed his ways. In October, he told a crowd of supporters on the island of Ischia that he had introduced the bidet to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and in so doing “taught these lusty Africans that there’s also foreplay.”

The audience applauded.

“It’s not shocking, because in the end, Italians think it’s normal,” Lorella Zanardo, a women’s rights advocate and filmmaker, said of the muted reaction to reports of sexual harassment in the country. Especially in high-profile fields such as film, politics and the media, she said, “the idea of a woman advancing her career by giving or selling her body, it’s taken for granted.”

Mr. Berlusconi himself has contributed to the country’s perception of women as decorative objects of desire, Ms. Zanardo said, by casting them as scantily clad adornments on his television channels. But she acknowledged that the popularity and durability of those shows over the last 40 years showed an eager audience among Italians, many of whom still think of women in archetypes of care-taking madonnas or corrupting Jezebels, with little room in between.

Perhaps nowhere has the view of sex as a transactional feature of Italian life been as stark as in the backlash against Ms. Argento.

The daughter of Italy’s most famous director of horror movies, she describes living a nightmare since becoming one of the first women to make a public accusation against Mr. Weinstein, whom she said performed oral sex on her against her will. She says she is afraid to leave her house, and plans to flee the country in response to particularly virulent attacks in the news media.