Gordon K. Sattro calls her claims a 'self-serving and slanderous one which is offensive, not only to my client, but in all likelihood to victims both silent and outspoken.'

• Sep 7, 2018

AceShowbiz - Italian actress Asia Argento has been slammed by her sexual assault accuser's attorney for suggesting she was the victim.

Last month, Jimmy Bennett accused her of seducing him in a California hotel room in 2013, when he was just 17, but Asia quickly denied his story, insisting she had never had a "sexual relationship" with him.

She also confessed that her late boyfriend, TV chef Anthony Bourdain, agreed to pay Bennett $380,000 (£296,000) in an effort to stop him harrassing her.

But a day after she released her statement, texts in which she appeared to admit to sleeping with Bennett and photographs featuring the pair topless in bed together emerged online.

That briefly silenced the actress, who has lost her gig as a judge on a TV talent show in Italy as a result of the scandal, but now she's fighting back, insisting she was actually the sexual assault victim.

"Asia chose at the time not to prosecute Bennett for sexually attacking her," her attorney Mark Jay Heller told TMZ.

Bennett's lawyer, Gordon K. Sattro, has responded, calling the 42-year-old actress' latest blast a "slanderous" misrepresentation.

"This situation has escalated due to Asia's offensive and dismissive interpretation of this situation in whole," Sattro tells Us Weekly in a statement on Thursday, September 06. "After reviewing the letter from Asia's third attorney, I am shocked, appalled, and disgusted by their representations, mischaracterizations, and attacks.

"If I were to sum up the letter from Asia and her attorney in a single word it would be 'hypocritical', with a close second being 'non-sensical'," he adds. "We read this statement as a self-serving and slanderous one which is offensive, not only to my client, but in all likelihood to victims both silent and outspoken, everywhere."

Argento's attorney continues to insist the scandal is just a desperate money grab by Bennett, now 22, who said last month he had originally chosen to handle the matter in private, but went public after the actress opened up about her alleged sexual assault at the hands of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

The "xXx" star claimed the producer raped her in his hotel room in Cannes, France in 1997.