During the war, Maria Denis was linked to Pietro Koch, the notorious
Roman police chief during the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944. After
the war, at her trial on charges of collaboration, she succeeded in
convincing the court that she was only taking advantage of Koch's
infatuation to help anti-fascists getting released, in particular the
film director Luchino Visconti, with whom she was infatuated (Visconti
had been arrested and imprisoned for political sympathies closely
linked to the partisans). She was subsequently acquitted. Throughout
his life, Visconti claimed that Denis's involvement in his release was
simply not true and refused to appear in court during her trial. Still
she maintained her story in her autobiography, "Il gioco della verità"
("Truth or dare") and again in the documentary director Gianfranco
Mingozzi was making about her shortly before her death.
