The Many Deaths of Nora Dalmasso

Amazon Prime Documentary 2025

The Many Deaths of Nora Dalmasso is a documentary about the death of a high-profile society beauty in Argentina in November 2006, and a shaming indictment of the misogyny, double standards, and class resentments in that country.

51 year-old Nora was born into a wealthy family and blessed with immense beauty and charisma. When she married a successful physician, Marcello Macarron, they became the darlings of a certain kind of glossy magazine - the haves, whose lifestyles were pored over and envied by the have-nots in the country.

The death occurred on a weekend when Nora’s husband was away in Uruguay for a golf competition, which he won. Her daughter Valentina, then 16, was in the US for a year, her son Facundo, then 20, was studying at university in Argentina. The family lived in an expensive gated community in Rio Cuarto. But despite Nora’s fame, the rest of the family were very private.

Nora was found strangled by the belt of her bathrobe on her daughter’s bed by a neighbour on the Sunday. She was naked except for her Rolex and the cloth belt around her neck which was tied in a double knot. The post-mortem declared that she had had consensual sex before she died from strangulation.

Quite how a post-mortem can be so sure that sex was consensual mystifies me. Many rape victims give in for fear of being harmed or even killed, so that there is no physical evidence of coercion. And if they decide it will do more harm to fight and scratch, there may well be no foreign DNA under their nails. Nevertheless, the post-mortem results were made widely available, and the fact that they clearly stated that the sex had been consensual started the rumour mill whirling in all kinds of media.