Giovanni Pernice: The BBC washed their hands of me and left me feeling suicidal

Chris HarveyTue, August 25, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC

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Giovanni Pernice, photographed in Rome where he is exclusively speaking to The Telegraph about his forthcoming memoir, Gio: Taking the Lead - Laura Larmo for The Telegraph

Giovanni Pernice has waited a long time to tell his side of the story about his departure from Strictly Come Dancing in 2024. Having joined the show in 2015, he had quickly become its brightest star and best dancer, and had given it the most magical moment in its history. In 2021, he and actress Rose Ayling-Ellis, who was born deaf, won the Glitterball Trophy and hearts everywhere for their “Couple’s Choice” routine.

It included an 18-second segment in which the music, Symphony by Clean Bandit, faded into silence as the couple continued their graceful dance. They were opening a window on to Ayling-Ellis’s world for millions of viewers. “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen on the show,” dancer-turned-judge Anton Du Beke said afterwards.

The moment catapulted Pernice to wider fame. He enjoyed sold-out tours, and made a BBC travelogue with Du Beke – Anton and Giovanni in Sicily – in which Pernice took the Strictly veteran, 25 years his elder, on a road trip around the island of his birth. Pernice was training to be a presenter, too, courtesy of the Corporation.

Following Strictly success, Pernice (left) and judge Anton Du Beke co-hosted Anton & Giovanni’s Adventures In Spain - BBC Studios

But thanks to an ill-fated pairing with actress Amanda Abbington in 2023, his time on Strictly came to a sudden halt. Pernice, then 33, and Abbington, then 49 – and best known for her appearance on the BBC’s Sherlock – performed thrillingly at first. Abbington could really dance; the duo looked well set to make the final. Yet just five weeks into the competition, Abbington announced her withdrawal – and so began a chain of events that would drive Pernice to the brink of suicide.

In 2024, months after quitting, Abbington made an official complaint to the BBC, in which she alleged 17 instances of bullying, abuse and even physical violence by Pernice. Soon after, it was announced that Pernice would not return for the show’s next run. In the Corporation’s subsequent investigation, none of the most serious allegations would be upheld, though six others were, for which Abbington received an apology and, earlier this month, a five-figure payout.

Pernice dancing alongside Amanda Abbington on Strictly Come Dancing in 2023, who later alleged instances of bullying and abuse - Guy Levy/BBC

Pernice, however, feels a keen sense of injustice about all of this, and he wants to talk about it. He’s legally barred from revealing the full findings of the investigation, but in his forthcoming memoir, Gio: Taking the Lead, he highlights the BBC’s acknowledgement that “I had made concerted efforts to be positive and supportive to Amanda, in both the training room and our text conversations”. He adds that most of the upheld complaints merely related to him swearing: “They found that I threw my arms up and said ‘f---’ on one occasion.”

“If it was me,” he tells me, “I would say to the BBC, give out the results [of the investigation]. The difference between ‘I [deliberately] stepped on your feet’, or ‘he bruised me’, or ‘he broke my rib’ – that’s a serious allegation. But if people knew the reasons why the complaints were upheld, they would say, ‘Are you joking?’”

He is furious, as will become clear, with the BBC. “I was their golden boy, and at the end of the day, they discovered that I used the F-word with a person who used to use the C-word with me. And that I didn’t give her a break during the dancing. I’m not on Strictly any more because of that?” He sounds like he’s still in disbelief. “Take a break. What am I gonna do? Shoot you in the head if you take a break?”

Abbington claimed that she had been “triggered” by Pernice’s behaviour in the training studio. In the years before, she’d spoken widely about experiencing depression and mental-health issues. “I strongly believe that Amanda should not have been on the show in the first place,” Pernice says. “Or, if you want to put her on the show, put her with somebody much ‘nicer’ than me. And when I say nicer, I mean ‘less competitive’.”

After the competition, Abbington claimed that she had been ‘triggered’ by Pernice’s behaviour in the training studio - Guy Levy/BBC

Ironically, their pairing was his idea. At an early rehearsal, with the newly signed celebrities, he saw Abbington’s potential as a dancer and insisted on being with her. He now thinks that the BBC producers, having let Abbington on to the show in the first place, should at least, knowing Pernice’s teaching style, have vetoed the match. “I’m a taskmaster,” he says. “But I know that I can take you to the final, and that I can take you to win the show – if you want to be pushed.”

In the memoir, he puts his thoughts on the BBC plainly: “I feel they hung me out to dry to cover their backs. I was devastated by that.” Worse, he writes, the BBC’s statement and public apology to Abbington “made it seem like all of the stories in the newspaper[s] were real, when most of them had been found to be totally untrue. Her claims had ruined my life and my career. Where was my apology?”

Pernice and I are meeting in Rome. It’s a baking 36 degrees. Fittingly, he arrives on a Vespa, Roman Holiday-style, dressed in blue jeans, a crisp white shirt and a cream jacket. Now 35 years old, he looks sharp. Helmet removed, his dark hair is slicked back, his stud earrings a halo cluster of diamonds. “I made an effort,” he says. I sense he always does.

‘I made an effort’: Pernice pictured during his interview with Chris Harvey in Rome - Laura Larmo for The Telegraph

Pernice has returned to the top in his native country, winning the Strictly franchise show Ballando con le Stelle (Dancing with the Stars) in 2024, and falling in love with his celebrity partner, the Italian actress and television presenter Bianca Guaccero. It’s a visible redemption – plus the coffee is much better here, he tells me, although he still travels regularly to Britain to tour and hold dance classes.

There’s a wry self-awareness to Pernice that I wasn’t entirely expecting. When I suggest that the “obsessive tidiness and cleanliness” he writes about in the book must create some relationship problems, he shoots me one of those looks that says, “tell me about it”. He laughs. “Bianca is very tidy, don’t get me wrong, but I’m on a different level.”

Pernice with actress Bianca Guaccero on the Italian version of the show Ballando con le Stelle. The pair are now together - Chris Warde-Jones

Success, across both Strictly and Ballando, was a long, hard road that required plenty of that obsessiveness. Pernice was born in 1990. As a youngster, he swapped playing football with his friends – kicking plastic bottles around the streets of Palermo – for the dream of becoming a dancer. He was bullied in school, he says, because he danced.

“It’s a stupid mentality, even now in Sicily.” But his parents were supportive. His mother, a housewife, gave him her love of dance; his father, a traffic policeman, worked extra hours to fund his classes. (It would be one of the proudest moments of his life, he tells me, when he paid off his parents’ debts from his Strictly earnings.) He danced at first with his elder sister, but soon found a partner of his own, with whom he had his first kiss.

Pernice’s parents, Piero and Rosalda, encouraged their son’s love of dance from a young age - X/Giovanni Pernice

At 14, he moved alone to the mainland, and Bologna, to train at the dance school Team Diablo. It was there that he learnt true discipline. Pernice had to adopt a punishing 16-hour daily routine. He would wake up at six o’clock, run, lift weights and do cardio exercise for two-and-a-half hours, practice with a partner for four hours, take a short break for lunch, sit through lectures, have two hours of dance lessons with a teacher, have dinner, then begin evening practice, in which all the couples would dance together until 10 o’clock at night. They would do this for four consecutive weekdays, before flying out on Fridays to take part in competitions all over Europe. Pernice and his partner, Erika Attisano, became Italian champions in 2012.

I tell him that I’m struck by the intensity of the details: that his body was weighed, for example, once a week. Wasn’t this sort of pressure that led to the recent scandal at the Royal Ballet School, in which 50 ex-students complained to the BBC about body-shaming and “toxic” teaching?

“It’s a culture thing,” he replies. “In my opinion, Britain is becoming way too weak in everything. The Royal Ballet has been there for 100 years. It’s always had the best dancers in the world” – he points to Darcey Bussell, the company’s former principal dancer and later a Strictly judge – “and you don’t think that these problems were there before? ‘Don’t eat much because otherwise you don’t look good, your ability to spin is different, you break your ankles…’ There are reasons why people say that. It’s not [that] somebody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You’re fat.’

“Of course, Strictly is different. It’s an entertainment show. But if you sign up to be the best ballerina in the world, you know, there are rules.” (Mark Monahan, chief dance critic of this newspaper, put it succinctly in 2023: “There has never been a great, or even good, ballet dancer who did not appear light.”)

By 2014, Pernice was auditioning for Strictly, where he told the producers: “I’m Italian. I’m a good-looking man. I can dance, and I love to win.” Did he find himself having to play up to that image? “No, this is just who I am,” he says with a grin.

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When auditioning for Strictly in 2014, Pernice told the producers: ‘I’m Italian. I’m a good-looking man. I can dance, and I love to win’ - Ray Burmiston/BBC

On Strictly, Pernice quickly established himself. As a dancer, he brought attack, dynamics, bearing and musicality, a combination that made him exciting to watch. He also had the quality that marks out all exceptional dancers: he drew the eye. In his very first series, partnered with Coronation Street actress Georgia May Foote, they made it to the final. After the show ended, he and Foote became a couple. The relationship helped him to settle; his English was still rudimentary. And as he notes in Taking the Lead, “the more established pros were often a bit suspicious of the new arrivals. Brendan Cole was always keen to let us know that he was the ‘bad guy’, he was the one who started the ‘Strictly curse’, he was the original lothario.”

That curse – the pattern of hook-ups between Strictly partners, and break-ups in existing relationships – has been a boon for the tabloids. But Pernice thinks it’s over-hyped. “What about the ‘office curse’, or the ‘supermarket curse’? It’s the same thing. People spend time together every day, they end up sleeping together.”

Besides, he thinks, the chaperones that have been present in the Strictly training studios since 2024, following both Abbington’s complaints and the prior sacking of dancer Graziano Di Prima – caught on camera kicking his partner, reality TV celebrity Zara McDermott, in 2023 – mean that “it’s not going to happen ever again… Because you don’t have any more freedom to get to know the person in front of you.

“Now you’re worried: how am I going to talk to you? How am I going to touch you? How can you do an Argentine tango or a rumba when somebody next to you is watching, and saying, ‘Stay a bit further out’”.

Fellow dancer Graziano Di Prima was sacked from Strictly in 2024 after footage showed him kicking partner Zara McDermott - Guy Levy/BBC

He and Foote moved in together, but the relationship ended shortly afterwards. The problems, he thinks, were compounded by his next Strictly partner, Love Island’s Laura Whitmore, being a friend of Foote’s. Whitmore began, Pernice says, by telling him that she’d wanted to dance with Cole, not him. (She would later come out in support of Abbington, as would another of Pernice’s partners, Ranvir Singh.) Pernice accepts that he and Whitmore “didn’t like each other from day one”, but thinks it was a simple personality clash, of a kind that is more common on Strictly than people think.

“A lot of people have a problem with their partners. But you compromise – you have to say, ‘We are here for the same reason. We want to look good on the Saturday [live show].’” Family life and everything else, he says, gets pushed aside by the pressure to perform a new dance every week. “It’s a very difficult show to do. It requires a lot, physically, mentally.”

And some of Pernice’s other partners have been vocally supportive. Debbie McGee, who at 58 reached the 2017 final with him, sprang to his defence when Abbington’s allegations first emerged in January 2024. McGee immediately posted a picture of the two of them together on the show, with the caption: “Happy memories. Giovanni and I had the best of times on Strictly.” Another former partner, Michelle Visage, the US TV personality, offered her support. The Strictly judges were also swift to back him. Shirley Ballas defended him on TV as “an absolute gentleman” and “a splendid teacher”.

Giovanni Pernice and Debbie McGee in 2017. McGee later came to Pernice’s defence following Abbington’s allegations - BBC/Kieron McCarron

But Rose Ayling-Ellis said nothing. Pernice says he’d thought of them as “very, very good friends”. He shrugs. “It’s one of those things.” What really hurt was all the people on the show who abandoned him. Dancers, production staff, people he regarded as close friends. The famous “Strictly family”, he says, “doesn’t exist”. He’d longed for a simple message: “‘Hope you’re OK?’ That’s all I needed.” He leaves a pause. “Never arrived.”

The first Pernice knew of the accusations was in April 2024. He was informed by BBC executives that “there had been official complaints made by ‘a person you have worked with’”. He was told that they couldn’t guarantee him a place for the next series’ autumn launch. To begin with, he didn’t even engage a lawyer, in the belief that it was like being stopped for a breathalyser test when “you know you haven’t had a drink”. Then Abbington’s version of events began to appear in the media.

Pernice had been told not to talk to the press, and await an official hearing at the BBC. At that point, he didn’t even know what the allegations were. Yet the complete list had apparently been leaked to The Sun. They became more and more extreme. “At one point,” he recalls, “it was put out that every time [Abbington] got a step right, I would have an erection. I’m like, ‘How is it even possible to put something like this in a newspaper?’”

Left in the dark, Pernice began “spiralling mentally”. He phoned his family in Italy daily, and tried to put a brave face on things. The tabloids sent people to wait outside his parents’ door to ask whether their son was a bully. “I went into this black hole,” he says. He couldn’t bear to go out. His new relationship, with influencer Molly Brown, foundered. “Molly was exquisite, supportive,” he says, “but I was just not able to be with somebody else… I didn’t want to see anybody.” He sank into depression, gaining 1st 12lb and even developing myocarditis – an inflammation of the heart muscle that causes symptoms similar to a mild heart attack. Thoughts of suicide began to intrude.

“I’m a very work-oriented person,” he says. “I really dedicate my life to work. It wasn’t even the financial [side]. It’s more, I have to do something. I always wanted to be something.

“I was thinking, ‘There’s no place for me any more in this industry. So what’s the point?’ That’s when I thought, ‘Well, let’s end this. There’s no point. Let’s end it. I’m never going to have back what I had.’”

What saved him, he insists, “was the audience, the general public. They have been, through all of this, incredible. At one point, my agent said to me that he had 3,000 letters in the studio, saying the same thing: ‘Give our love to Giovanni’”.

He’s aware that Abbington’s experience was also unpleasant. She faced a long campaign of vile messages, even death threats. “I’m sorry, because nobody should experience that,” he emphasises. “After three years, I can tell you, Chris, that I don’t have any sort of anger towards her. I’m disappointed, but more with the BBC than Amanda.”

He thinks there was a failure in duty of care to Abbington and to himself: “They didn’t look after me. ‘Well, you’re not contracted with us, your contract finished in December.’ Yeah, but I’ve been with you for nine years, so you can look after me. If I’m sending an email saying that I’ve got myocarditis and depression, you can’t even reply to me and say, ‘Oh, sorry if you feel a bit down’? We were all in the room. We were all together when this problem started. We were talking about the whole thing. We were, as a team. How are we gonna deal with this? But they washed their hands of it.”

Pernice says the BBC failed in its duty of care to both Abbington and himself - Laura Larmo for The Telegraph

Does he feel like the victim here? “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘victim’. ‘Victim’ is a big word. I was bullied by the newspapers – that’s for sure, very bullied. I felt that way every single day. They were writing stuff about me that was simply not true. Every day, day after day… This is what happened to people like Caroline Flack.” (The Love Island host, who won the 12th series of Strictly and returned for the 2018 Christmas special, took her own life in 2020 after being charged with assaulting her boyfriend, then suffering a relentless tabloid onslaught.) “She was a very, very good friend of mine. Full of talent, full of energy, full of life. I never thought she would be able to do anything like that. But the newspapers destroyed her.”

Finally, in July 2024, barely a fortnight before the hearing, Pernice was told what he was accused of. He told the investigators: “I think I can refute every allegation.” He had kept all of the WhatsApp messages and voice notes he’d exchanged with Abbington – including one that Abbington had sent just one day into the group rehearsals, jokily saying: “Happy birthday, k---head.”

“When I walked into the [investigators’] room,” he tells me, “I didn’t have to say much. I just played the voice recording and they understood. If you say that, you are setting the tone. Today, if I walked into this room and said, “Hi, nice to meet you, d---head’, you’d know exactly where this conversation is going.”

He feels sure of one thing: if he hadn’t kept the evidence, or asked for his and Abbington’s sessions to be filmed early on, he would have found himself thrown to the wolves. “The 17 allegations would have been upheld, all of them. Not because they were true – just because of the way the BBC handled the whole thing.” Not just his Strictly time, but his entire career would surely be over.

He shrugs. “The BBC should say, ‘We f---ed up by putting you together. Sorry, Amanda, because of this. Sorry, Giovanni, to do that. Let’s move on.’” Pernice, for his part, is now ready to do exactly that.

Gio: Taking the Lead (Headline, £22) will be published on Aug 27.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”