Phone calls and leaked documents: The chilling true story behind Netflix’s Vatican Girl.

Warning: This article mentions sexual abuse and may be distressing for some readers.

Netflix’s latest true crime deep dive features the complicated tale of Emanuela Orlandi.

Over four episodes, Vatican Girl delves into the disappearance of the 15-year-old girl, who went missing in 1983. There’s been no trace of her since. 

Almost 40 years later, Orlandi is the only Vatican city citizen considered missing, with the strange circumstances around her disappearance having never been fully unravelled.

It’s theorised today that her vanishing might have even been international and carried out by those who had issues with the Vatican.

Here’s everything the series taught us about the ongoing missing persons case.

Watch the trailer for Vatican Girl. Post continues below.

Who was Emanuela Orlandi?

Emanuela Orlandi was a 15-year-old girl who lived in Vatican City, sharing an apartment with her family. Her father worked for the Vatican, but he was one of the very few non-clerics who worked there.

On June 22, 1983, Emanuela left her home to attend a flute lesson in the middle of Rome, and never returned. She called home to say she’d been scouted to sell Avon beauty products after her lesson, but the understanding was still that she would be returning home.

She was last seen allegedly getting into a green BMW, but apart from that information, she seems to have disappeared without a trace.

What happened to her?

The theories surrounding Orlandi’s disappearance are layered and complex. 

In the months following her disappearance, Orlandi’s family reported they received ransom calls that claimed their daughter had been kidnapped, and would be released if they could engineer the release of Mehmet Ali Agca from prison.

Agca shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 in an attempted assassination. The New York Times had reported that Agca had described the Pope as “the masked leader of the crusades”, and that he planned to assassinate him as revenge for ongoing attacks on the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

The calls, and testimony from all involved, has led to two popular theories about Orlandi’s disappearance.

The first is that it she was kidnapped by an international terrorist group linked to Agca. 

The second is that the Italian mafia kidnapped her in order to blackmail the Vatican for money after the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, an Italian bank, for whom the Vatican was a main shareholder.

However, neither theory has been proven. 

Emanuela Orlandi. Image: Netflix.

Was Orlandi the victim of a sexual crime?

There is also insinuation in the documentary that Orlandi might have been sexually abused, but no allegations are made.

Her brother, Pietro Orlandi, is interviewed for the series, and reveals that if a “cardinal” were making sexual advances toward Orlandi, she would not have told her parents, for fear of jeopardising her father’s job in Vatican City. However, he doesn’t confirm if this is hypothetical or his belief of what happened.

The series’ creators also made the choice to show pictures of Orlandi as a young girl juxtaposed with images of headlines about priests sexually abusing children, opening up the inference that this is something Orlandi might have faced.

The documentary also uncovered new information that could be loosely connected to this theory. A woman, who claimed she was a friend of Orlandi’s at the time she went missing, chose to speak on camera - although she remained anonymous.

She shared that Orlandi had told her that “someone close to the pope” had been “bothering” her while she walked in the Vatican Gardens. The friend interpreted this as a sexual advance, but Orlandi didn’t confirm this.

The document from the VatiLeaks Scandal

In 2012, corruption among Vatican finances was exposed when a number of confidential letters were leaked.

Through these leaked documents, the Orlandi family were able to find financial records that related to Orlandi’s lodging at a hostel for girls run by the Scalabrinian Missionaries in London.

The final item related to her was listed in July 1997, listed as “general activities and transfer to the Vatican City State with relative final paperwork”.

A lawyer interpreted this as the return of Orlandi’s body to Vatican City, but no remains have been found. 

You can stream Vatican Girl on Netflix.

Feature Image: Getty.