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Abstract: While media representations play a decisive role in shaping public understanding of gender-based violence (GBV), newspaper reporting on group sexual assault remains an under-researched dimension. Situated within the STEP Observatory’s ongoing monitoring of the Italian press, this study examines a corpus of 2,036 articles published across 26 Italian newspapers between 2020 and 2025 to investigate the coverage, newsworthiness criteria, and discursive framing of gang rape. The empirical findings demonstrate a stark discrepancy between press representation and statistical reality: while multi-perpetrator assaults account for approximately 2.06% of recorded rape cases in Italy, they comprise 11.3% of press coverage regarding sexual violence. News coverage is strongly linked to issue continuity, while two primary levers drive case visibility: the elite social status of perpetrators – which lowers news selection thresholds while granting prominent actors platforms to disseminate revictimizing narratives that erase their responsibility– and the intersectional positionality of victims and perpetrators. In cases involving offenders belonging to minoritized groups– more specifically along the axes of oppression of race, migratory status, and social marginality– the press mobilizes femonationalist and securitization rhetorics that conceal male responsibility and attribute GBV to external factors, without questioning fundamental gender power asymmetries. Furthermore, news coverage relies heavily on episodic framing, systematically obscuring the structural roots of GBV. These findings underscore the urgent need for critical media monitoring to foster gender-sensitive press coverage of GBV.