14 DAY TRIAL // Back in April this year, Silvio Berlusconi’s wife was scolding the politician in an open letter sent to a media agency for getting into a relationship, whose exact nature was not known at the time, with a much younger girl. A few weeks afterwards, Veronica Lario, the wife, was filing for divorce. Now, the perma-tanned Prime Minister is again taking some heat after rival political groups have made public recordings and transcripts of conversations between him and a female escort.
The recordings and the accompanying transcripts registered hundreds of hits within only minutes after being posted online, BBC News informs, which makes it so that now the Italian politician is again making headlines for his personal life, after only a short respite. While spokespersons for Berlusconi insist that the tapes made available are fake, they also say that, even if they were true, whoever made them public had no right to do so. Still, it is being said, since it’s the female escort herself who went to the media with them and she had made them, she certainly did have a right to do whatever she wanted with them.
“Patrizia D’Addario [the woman in question] told L’Espresso she had made the tapes during a visit to Mr. Berlusconi’s official Rome residence. In one conversation, a man can be heard telling a woman to wait for him in ‘Putin’s’ bed after having a shower. […] A spokesman for the 72-year-old’s political grouping, People of Freedom, said L’Espresso was merely trying to revive an ‘already dead’ scandal.” BBC News informs.
As the latest scandal does nothing good in terms of Berlusconi’s already soiled reputation as an upstanding politician and man, his people are trying to squash D’Addario’s claims as utter fabrications. However, should reports in the Italian media be accurate, it seems that most of the damage has already been done and, no matter how much Berlusconi discredits the woman, many have decided he’s not the kind of man they want to represent them. If there’s a chance the scandal is real – and there is, they say – then all the more reason to ask for Berlusconi’s resignation.
“Ms. D’Addario, 42, says she made recordings of her encounter with Mr. Berlusconi ‘so that nobody could deny I had been there.’ Last month, she said she had been paid more than 1,000 euros (£862; $1,420) to attend a party at the Palazzo Grazioli in October, in the company of other women. She alleged that she had been asked to return the following month and had spent the night with the prime minister, but was not paid.” BBC News writes. Meanwhile, Berlusconi alleges she has been paid more than plenty by someone else to spread these falsities.