FIRST there were the plans to put forward "showgirls" as potential members of the European Parliament. Even for their main backer, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, their credentials appeared to be of the aesthetic rather than the political kind.
Then came the 18th birthday party of aspiring teenage model Noemi Letizia. Berlusconi, claiming he was a friend of her father, attended and gave her a diamond necklace.
Now there are allegations that a former model was paid to attend a party at the 72-year-old premier's Rome palazzo on the night of the US elections and later stayed the night.
Even Italians used to the turbulent world of Berlusconi - just a month away from hosting a G8 summit of global leaders - are questioning how much longer the septuagenarian leader can stay at the head of his country given the renewed fixation with his headline-grabbing private life.
The prime minister had hoped to repair his battered image as an international statesman in advance of G8. But newspaper editor Giuliano Ferrara, up to now one of Berlusconi's staunchest supporters, said the prime minister had to decide if he wanted to "drown in a happy ending made up of parties and beautiful girls" or restore some dignity to "a great political adventure".
James Walston, political science professor at the American University of Rome and a long-time Berlusconi watcher, said that with the G8 looming, the prime minister could not afford more personal scandal. "The G8 is coming but he'll have to spend a lot of time denying that he was involved in an escort service rather than being a statesman with the likes of Obama."
Berlusconi's personal problems have given his opponents a rare chance to deal a blow to the prime minister, who dominates the political landscape and remains popular in opinion polls despite several scandals and the global downturn. On Friday, Rosy Bindi, deputy house speaker from the Democratic Party, said: Either Berlusconi explains what happens or he must go." Antoino Di Pietro, leader of the Italy of Principles party, said Berlusconi was a latter-day Nero whose "weakness" for women was opening him up to blackmail.
An article run by the French political magazine L'Express last week will not help. Berlusconi is alleged to have told former French president Jacques Chirac, who was visiting his home: "See that bidet.... you don't know how many bottom cheeks have been on there." Picking up a pornographic magazine, he then pointed to a number of girls, claiming they were conquests.
His wife, Veronica Lario, is among the first to have deserted him. She filed for divorce after the Letizia incident in April, accusing him of "frequenting underage girls" and describing him as "not well". As divorces go, this one is proving to be distinctly messy.
The latest allegations involve Patrizia D'Addario, a 42-year-old former model and showgirl from Bari, in southern Italy.
According to Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading mainstream newspaper, magistrates investigating a Bari businessman, Giampaolo Tarantini, on suspicion of corruption discovered that he had paid female escorts to accompany him at dinner parties at Berlusconi's house.
Corriere said one of the three women told magistrates she spent the night at the large, two-floor residence in part of a former palace in central Rome which Berlusconi uses as his private residence. This was seven months before his wife began proceedings for divorce.
D'Addario maintains that she visited the Palazzo Grazioli twice last year, first in October after being asked by Tarantini. She told an interviewer that she had asked for payment and a fee of ?2,000 euros had been agreed.
She said she had attended the party along with 20 other women where they ate pizza, drank champagne and were shown videos of Berlusconi's meetings with President Bush. She says: "I knew he was struck by me because he asked what work I did and I told him about a residential hotel I wanted to build." She had returned to her hotel rather than staying the night and so had only been paid ?1,000 euros.
Then, on 4 November, the night of the US presidential elections, she had been asked to return to the villa. She says that when Berlusconi saw her "he immediately remembered my building project. Then he asked me to stay". She claims she has tape recordings of both encounters.
D'Addario told Corriere della Sera that he had promised to send "two of his trusted people" to Bari to help dismantle hurdles to her construction project but he had not stuck to his promise.
She had also been dropped as a candidate for the Euro elections earlier this month when his wife objected to her husband's plan to field "showgirls". She later stood as a local candidate for Berlusconi's ruling People of Liberty party but had not been elected.
Berlusconi, now in his third term as prime minister, following two earlier scandal-tinged spells in the 1990s, has come out fighting as usual.
"Once more, newspapers are full of trash and falsehoods," he said. "I am not going to let myself be affected by these aggressions."
His lawyer Nicolo Ghedini, said that even if the allegations were true, Berlusconi could not control who his male guests brought to the prime minister's residence and he would have been at the very most an "unwitting subject".
But Ghedini came under attack in newspaper editorials for saying that even if Berlusconi had had anything to do with the women he would only have been "an end user, and so not punishable". He later apologised for his choice of words.
Published Date: 21 June 2009
By Philip Pullella in Rome
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