Call girl denies media paid her to accuse Berlusconi

A call girl at the centre of allegations over Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s sex life on Friday denied having been paid by journalists to sully his reputation.

Patrizia D’Addario (42), who has claimed she spent a night with Berlusconi and filmed his bedroom with her cellphone, has threatened legal action against her accusers.

“These last days, the press has carried public declarations and reconstructions on the part of journalists that slander me,” she said in a statement issued by her lawyer Maria Pia Vigilante.

“I will respond to each one of them with legal actions,” she added.

“I understand that the foreign minister, Franco Frattini, says that several call girls have been paid by journalists to ‘make false accusations against Silvio Berlusconi’,” she continued.

If Frattini was referring to her, then she was issuing a firm denial, she said, adding that the foreign minister should either produce evidence or keep quiet.

On Thursday, in comments to the BBC, Frattini accused the doe-eyed blonde of having made “absolutely false” statements regarding Berlusconi and said she had been paid by journalists to do so, the Ansa news agency reported.

But D’Addario has said she records all her conversations with her clients.

She has handed over recordings of those with Berlusconi to an investigation in the southern Italian city of Bari into entrepreneur Gianpaolo Tarantini, who allegedly arranged the tryst with Berlusconi.

Tarantini is suspected of corruption and abetting prostitution in the investigation, which does not target the billionaire prime minister.

The Times of London reported last month that D’Addario had “turned against” Berlusconi because he did not keep a promise to help her obtain a building permit for a residential complex she wanted to build on her family’s land.

The left-leaning weekly newsmagazine L’Espresso has posted audio clips of purported recordings of conversations between D’Addario and Berlusconi on its internet site.

Berlusconi, who conceded on Wednesday that he is “not a saint,” is already facing a highly public divorce over his unexplained relationship with an 18-year-old aspiring model who calls him “Daddy”.

But he has also insisted that nothing untoward could happen at the social occasions he hosted at any of his homes “because I am a person of good taste, culture and elegance”.—Sapa-AFP