Gianni Versace’s longtime lover has broken his silence for the first time since the famed fashion designer’s 1997 murder — to slam Ricky Martin’s portrayal of him in an upcoming series of “American Crime Story.”
“The picture of Ricky Martin holding the body in his arms is ridiculous,” Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s boyfriend of 15 years, told The Guardian in a story published Sunday. “Maybe it’s the director’s poetic license, but that is not how I reacted.”
D’Amico, 58, revealed how that tragic moment really played out.
He says he was drinking coffee on the porch of their Miami Beach mansion while Versace went out to buy the paper from a local cafe when he heard the shots.
“I felt as if my blood had turned to ice,” he told the paper.
He and their butler went outside to find the Italian fashion icon lying on the steps in a pool of blood, he said.
But then he was pulled away from the scene, so he was never able to cradle his lover’s head the way a blood-splattered Martin was shown doing in stills released in May.
“At that point, everything went dark. I was pulled away, I didn’t see any more,” D’Amico said.
The shooter, 27-year-old serial killer Andrew Cunanan, offed himself with the same gun shortly after, and his motive remains a mystery — leading to decades of speculation and, D’Amico says, fake news.
“There has been so much written and said about the murder, and thousands of suppositions, but not a trace of reality,” he told The Guardian.
In another scene, Versace, played by Edgar Ramirez, freaks out when he thinks the paparazzi have caught the pair touching — but D’Amico said he was very open about his sexuality, even before he came out in the 1980s.
“We lived like a natural couple, there was never a problem,” said D’Amico, a fashion designer himself who received a monthly stipend of $30,555 for life in Versace’s will.
D’Amico says he wasn’t consulted on the Ryan Murphy-produced “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” and doesn’t plan on watching it when it screens next year.