Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter in Twitter feud with comic Jim Carrey

Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, is engaged in a bitter feud with Jim Carrey, the actor best known for the likes of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber.

No, this is not an April Fools’ Day joke, and yes, the internet is to blame.

It all started on Saturday, when Carrey, who in recent years has reinvented himself as an anti-Trump political cartoonist, tweeted out a picture of his latest drawing.

The graphic sketch showed the elder Mussolini and his lover, Clara Petacci, being hanged upside down from a metal girder in Milan after their execution in 1945.

“If you’re wondering what fascism leads to, just ask Benito Mussolini and his lover Claretta,” Carrey wrote.

More than 100,000 people had liked the picture as Tuesday. Alessandra Mussolini, a former actress and Playboy cover model who is a member of the European parliament, wasn’t one of them.

“You are a bastard,” she wrote to Carrey on Sunday.

The far-right politician, who has aggressively defended her deceased grandfather and even fought to pass the family name down to her children, didn’t stop there.

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Suggesting that Carrey should instead try his hand at depicting various dark points in American history, she asked if he was familiar with the story of Rosa Parks and sent him a photo of an atomic bomb setting off a mushroom cloud.

When reminded that Carrey was born in Canada, she pointed out, correctly, that he is a naturalised American citizen.

Carrey, who typically does not engage with his many critics on social media, has yet to respond.

But after declaring his drawings to be “dirty paper”, Mussolini went on to argue with Twitter users who had criticised her grandfather for several hours on Sunday, calling one a “piece of human garbage” and insulting the families of others, in both English and Italian.

Even after declaring that she had “had enough fun replying to the keyboard antifa”, she kept going, using colourful language to dismiss her many antagonists.

“Do you want applause?” she asked one man who had informed her that his grandfather “fought to liberate Europe from people like your grandfather.”

Eventually, she concluded her Twitter rampage by announcing that American anti-fascists were even more boring than those in Italy, and certainly much more sensitive and irritable.

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Mussolini, with a decades-long career in Italian politics, has been an ongoing source of fodder for the tabloid press: she famously got in a brawl with Italy’s minister for equal opportunities while taping a television talk show, kicking the woman and calling her an “ugly communist” who should “go and live in Cuba”.

In 2015, amid a national scandal surrounding an elite prostitution ring, her husband received a one-year jail sentence and a €1,800 fine (roughly equivalent to US$2,025 today) for patronising teenage prostitutes, who he claimed he hadn’t realised were underage.

Mussolini has acknowledged that the anti-Semitic laws her grandfather instituted, which prevented Jews from working or attending schools, were wrong.

She has also expressed sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust and deemed his alliance with Adolf Hitler to be a mistake.

But she has simultaneously displayed a surprising amount of pride in her family heritage and lobbied the Italian government to make it easier for mothers to pass their last names along to their children.

In 2004, she told The Los Angeles Times that it had taken a year of wrangling with bureaucrats before she was able to give her three children the Mussolini name and that she had considered naming her son Benito but ultimately named him after her father, Romano.

Last year, she tweeted that she would tell the authorities and take legal action against anyone who defamed her grandfather online.

Speaking to The Independent in 2004, she shrugged off questions about her family’s role in one of the darkest chapters of history, noting that she had never known anything different.

“I cannot grow up in another family, so for me it is natural,” she said.