Start Up, Fall Down: From Billionaire to Convict

The Rot in the Penthouse

There is a special kind of dizziness that comes from looking out over a city from a penthouse so expensive it seems to float above ordinary life. Stay up there long enough and you can start to believe gravity is for other people. Maybe morality too.

That feeling hangs over *Start Up, Fall Down: From Billionaire to Convict*, Netflix's three-part docuseries about Alberto Genovese's collapse. Once treated as a tech-world golden boy in Milan, Genovese became the center of a horrifying case in late 2020, when an 18-year-old woman escaped his luxury apartment—grimly named "Terrazza Sentimento"—after hours of drug-fueled sexual assault. The series tracks the scandal, the investigation, and the media storm that followed, but what really sits beneath it is a study of how wealth can insulate cruelty until someone barely makes it out alive.



Director Nicola Prosatore and writer Alessandro Garramone are clearly aiming past standard true crime. The bigger target is Milan's startup elite during the pandemic years: the money, the parties, the self-mythologizing emptiness of it. Genovese made his fortune through sites like Facile.it, then turned his apartment into a sealed-off playground where cocaine circulated freely and young women were treated as disposable. The documentary is strongest when it looks at the ecosystem around him—the people who noticed, complained, suspected, and kept going anyway. The music was loud. The money was louder.

I did keep bumping up against the show's own polished surface, though. The crimes are hideous, but Netflix-style true crime has a habit of sanding horror into something sleek, and this series falls into that trap now and then. *NSS Magazine* described the format as often being "aestheticized to achieve a clean, flawless, almost anesthetized package", and that tension is hard to miss here.



The weakest stretches are the reconstructed ones. When the archival record runs thin, the filmmakers fall back on glossy digital recreations and simulated chat screens. During the episode that reconstructs the events of October 2020, those glowing text bubbles are supposed to make the night feel immediate. For me they did the opposite. They made the whole thing look processed, too designed. A woman escaping a predator's apartment near the Duomo is horrifying without any need for an interface borrowed from a venture-capital presentation.

(You could argue the design choice echoes Genovese's tech-bro world, but I don't think the series earns that level of cleverness.)

What pulls the documentary back into focus is the space it gives the survivors. It refuses Genovese's courtroom self-portrait as a tragic addict overtaken by cocaine. Instead, it lets the women who endured Terrazza Sentimento sit in frame and tell you what happened. Their bodies do a lot of the speaking. Shoulders tighten. Voices flatten. The edit may be smooth, but the damage isn't.



There is one real misstep late on, when the third episode starts poking around Genovese's childhood bullying as if a cleaner psychological explanation might be waiting there. It feels cheap and a little evasive, almost like the series is reaching for a cause it can package. The truth it eventually lands on is uglier and much plainer. Genovese wasn't driven to these crimes by some neat tragic wound. He committed them because money let him build an environment where nobody around him could meaningfully say no—and where too many people never tried.