The call girl who says she spent the night with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has claimed she became the target of a string of attacks and threats after releasing alleged recordings of their encounters.
In a book about her experiences that was published yesterday, Patrizia D’Addario added a lesbian dimension to the allegations surrounding Italy’s billionaire leader.
The 42-year-old said that after she made her allegations, a car tried to ram into hers on a road near her home town of Bari in the south of Italy. She said that she had accelerated and lost control of her car.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“I found myself on the other side of the road, facing the wrong way. It was only by a miracle that I survived,” she wrote in an extract from her book published yesterday by a recently launched left-wing daily, Il Fatto Quotidiano.
D’Addario said she had also been the target of an attempted rape and received numerous menacing telephone calls. In one, the caller had threatened to abduct and rape her daughter. Her mother had been punched in the face in the street.
In the latest incident, her flat had been broken into. The thieves had taken much of her clothing, her diaries and her computer, but left behind a very expensive TV set, she wrote.
The man who accompanied D’Addario to the prime minister’s home is under investigation in Bari on suspicion of drug trafficking and aiding and abetting prostitution. Berlusconi is not a suspect in the inquiry and his lawyer has denied that the call-girl’s recordings are genuine.
D’Addario claimed to have visited Berlusconi’s private residence in Rome twice last year. On the first occasion, she said, the other guests at the dinner included two lesbians.
They “must be at home,” D’Addario wrote. “They kiss and stroke one another and address the prime minister in a very familiar way.”
This has political significance. Many conservative Italians ready to forgive, if not endorse, heterosexual promiscuity will be disconcerted by a claim that their leader’s private life extends to lesbianism.
In her book, written with a leading Italian journalist, D’Addario says that the two women were among about 20 at the first party. At one point, they were shown a political documentary including a sequence in which the anthem of the prime minister’s party (Meno male che Silvio c’e, which translates roughly as “Thank goodness for Silvio”) was played.
“Everyone in the room began to sing and do the [audience] wave. I looked on curiously and my first thought was that I was in a harem ... Being an escort, I reckon I have seen a good few things. But I’d missed out on this — 20 women for one man.”
Meanwhile, the Italian edition of music magazine Rolling Stone said on Monday it has elected sex scandal-plagued Berlusconi as this year’s “Rockstar of the Year.”
Berlusconi, a former cruise ship crooner, who continues to record Neapolitan love songs, did not win the title based on musical merits, the magazine said.
The 73-year-old media magnate-turned politician earned it “with a lifestyle for which the rock ‘n roll definition seems even to be reductive,” Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Carlo Antonelli said.
“Rod Stewart, Brian Jones and Keith Richards are greenhorns in comparison to Mr Berlusconi,” he said, referring to rock stars whose philandering or drug-related excesses have made headlines in the past.
“Michael Jackson’s Neverland is a little prairie house compared to Villa Certosa,” Antonelli said.
He was comparing the late “King of Pop’s” fairground-themed residence with Berlusconi’s sprawling Sardinian villa.
Earlier this year, Berlusconi took legal action to block the publication of photographs in which topless young women were seen cavorting at Villa Certosa.
Reports also emerged of dozens of young women allegedly paid to attend parties by Berlusconi at Villa Certosa and his Rome residence, Palazzo Grazioli.
In June, Berlusconi’s wife, former actress Veronica Lario, began divorce proceedings after accusing him of consorting with underage women.
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