Prostitute tells all about Berlusconi on live TV
Call-girl says Premier knew she had been paid for attending parties in Rome and Sardinia
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Independent Minds
AFP/Getty
Patrizia D'Addario's scheduled appearance on state TV has angered Silvio Berlusconi
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Any hope Silvio Berlusconi might have had of putting the summer sex scandals behind him evaporated last night when state television broadcast a live interview with the prostitute who claims to have taped her intimate bedroom conversations with the Italian Premier.
Patrizia D'Addario – who at 42 is more than 30 years Mr Berlusconi's junior – has already made what she claimed were tapes of their intimate pillow talk. But the potential political embarrassment she might cause on live TV had the government incandescent in the run-up to last night's broadcast.
And she duly delivered by dismissing the Prime Minister's claims that he was unaware that she was a call girl, in a live interview beamed from the southern city of Bari. "He knew – everyone at the parties knew," she said in reference to the now infamous gatherings the media mogul premier hosted in Rome and Sardinia.
Mr Berlusconi, whose Mediaset empire controls three private TV channels, dismissed the show as a "criminal use of public television". "Inviting a prostitute on to throw mud at the prime minister is a disgrace," he had earlier told La Stampa newspaper.
The Italian leader denies having paid for sex, or knowingly sleeping with prostitutes, and has dismissed claims by his estranged wife that he frequents minors, including Noemi Letizia, a would-be starlet whose 18th birthday party he attended.
D'Addario, who faced hovered on a giant screen above the seated guests, flicked her long blond hair nervously as she listened to Berlusconi supporters accuse her of exploiting and then betraying the Prime Minister.
She denied however, that she had given the supposed recordings of their pillow talk to the press. And she said that she had "absolutely nothing to be ashamed of".
Although the explosive mix of Italian politics and scandal has made headlines around the world for months, it is only in the last week that the country's own television outlets have broken the silence regarding D'Addario's claims.
State broadcaster Rai aired pre-recorded clips of her on last week's Annozero show, drawing 5.6 million viewers but provoking strong condemnation from the Berlusconi camp and a campaign for viewers to boycott paying their licence fee.
Annozero host, Michele Santoro, whose belligerence stands out in a sea of supine Italian TV presenters, yesterday shrugged off threats of fines and official investigations, revealing that the provisional title for the show had been "No Gianpi, no Party".
Businessman Gianpaolo Tarantini, to whom he was referring, is said to have procurred D'Addario and other prostitutes and paid their wages for Berlusconi's notorious "festini", or adult parties, in Rome and Sardinia. Tarantini was arrested two weeks ago for suspected cocaine dealing.
Earlier, deputy communications minister, Paolo Romani, had warned that the government would be "even more attentive" about whether RAI was adhering to its public service mandate, in view of the new D'Addario interview. He has launched an inquiry into Annozero, using an article of the broadcasting constitution that enables ministers to subpoena documents and check sources. He warned that if RAI was found to have broken its public service remit on grounds of fairness and decency, it could face fines "amounting to three per cent of its total turnover" – about €2.5 million.
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Comments
Having watched the show last night - as well as part of the sour grapes show on RAIUNO that followed, hosted by the RAI answer to Emilio Fede - I would like to congratulate RAI for having the guts to stand up to the bully-boy tactics of Berlusconi and his cronies.
I'm sure you will now get the usual raft of nonsense posted here by the Arcore fans, using their usual tactic of smoke and mirrors as they did both during the show itself and on Porta a Porta later, when they singularly failed in their attempt to shift the whole affair in the direction of a purely Pugliese health care scandal.
It is time that Berlusconi took on himself the mantle of a real statesman by resigning from his position, after making such a laughing stock of Italy during his time as prime minister by his appalling personal behaviour and the continuing abuse of his power as the Presidente del Consiglio.
Italians love hardcore dirty porn just like English people who are starved of love & sex.
Only when they realise how much they have been taken for a ride by their beloved "Papi", when unemployment rises inexorably, the lack of reforms, the rise of nepotism and corruption and the absence of real investment in the future means the economy fails to recover, will they revolt.
When they find their own families being hit hard in the pocket will they realise il Cavaliere is a total failure. But by then it will be too late. With its huge and growing public debt and the Euro hammering its export sector, Italy is an economic car crash waiting to happen. Visiting regularly, I can see the rising levels of distress as friends lose their jobs, Cassa Integrazione payments come to an end and family finances come under strain.
The sad thing is, there is no effective opposition: just a group of factious, self-regarding idiots intent on destroying each other while Italy heads for the rocks.
Some facts (source: Eurostat, 1 oct 2009)
Unemployment: Spain 18.9, France 9.9, EU16 9.6, EU27 9.1, UK 7.8, Italy 7.4. If Italy is "heading for the rocks", a "car crash waiting to happen", does that mean the others have already crashed?
Let me spell it: I'm not saying everything is rosy, far from it! All I am disputing is this constant habit (and RobertC displays it a lot in his posts) to blame B for every evil in the country, as if recession was not an international issue and Italy had been hit worst of all countries. Maybe he does not visit regularly enough.
How could you not blame him? He has been in power three times in the last 15 years and for six of the past eight years? Whose responsibility is it that the Italian economy has effectively not grown since 2001? The Pope's? The "communists'"?
You are just quoting the unemployment figures, Berlusconi's favourites, which understate the problem because people look first to their families for assistance, rather than the state. Very often, if you are unemployed in Italy, you receive absolutely nothing, so why register?
Look at figures for contraction in GDP: year on year it is down 6.0% - far worse than France and even worse than the UK. Exports have been absolutely massacred, down 26.9% in the first six months of 2009. Go to the ISTAT site if you doubt these figures.
Berlusconi has favoured corruption, failed to implement liberalising reforms and even tried to reverse some, always increased the public debt while in office, appointed ministers with zero qualifications for their roles. He spends his time relentlessly pursuing his own quest to avoid being prosecuted for a string of crimes and feathering his own nest while Italy collapses around him.
That is why he is to blame.
I'm so glad, of course, that there are no prostitutes in the UK and no politicians, judges, etc. ever have anything to do with them.
Excuse me while I leave the forum, I seem to have been overtaken by a violent coughing fit.
I was trying to help an Italian friend translate the phrase "fatti processare" i.e. "face charges in court", but it is difficult to create an authentic equivalent. Any senior UK politician faced with the kind of legal action Berlusconi has repeatedly seen would have been forced to step down immediately. These legal actions are not politically inspired plots. They are based on actual evidence presented in a court of law. Yet even when they see absolute proof of his guilt (e.g. the Mills case), Italians still go on voting for him.
Casanova of Venezia, who was imprisoned by the Inquisition but managed to escape over the rooftops of the Doge palace, to end up in Vienna as private secretary to an ambassador who took him with him eventually to a Bohemian town, where he continued to work for him until his death.
Anyhow, the point is that there she was, talking away, on national TV. Where is the controlling regime so many times denounced on these pages? I doubt in a regime Annozero & friends would exist, Repubblica would be able to publish what it did, Unità & Manifesto & co. would be allowed to keep on attacking (rightly so, let me add) the government.
It will be interesting to see in tomorrow demostration about "freedom of press" if anyone will hold banners defending the right of Berlsuconi owned Il Giornale to publish details of Avvenire's director previous run ins with justice, causing his resignations from the Vatican supporting paper (the opeartion was branded as "assassination" by the very same people supporting La Repubblica). Either one or the other, I'm afraid, people! Freedom must be for all, right? or only for some?
I just wonder when B will exit the political scene (can't be long now, him being 73) how will this fragmented opposition stick together? The only thing that keeps them going is a common hatred for B!
The events of the last week continue to demonstrate that Italy is in a very sick condition indeed.
And frankly, you can hardly say the story has been buried, given that it has been drummed in our ears for the whole summer, spanning from Papi to Escorts. Or are you actually saying (and believing) that up to last night italians were unaware of Noemi, Patrizia e co?
And surely I don't have to bring up the other aspect of the question: Berlusconi's ownership of most of the commercial TV and control over much of the rest.
There is absolutely nothing normal about Italian democracy, and the term is starting to sound like an oxymoron.
B owns a lot of the media here, and yet out of the last 5 electoral rounds he has won 3 and lost 2: fact. Not exactly evidence of brainwashing. Apart from dramatic statements so dear to the self proclaimed experts on Italy I read on these pages, I find that saying that the country is not democratic is frankly out of touch with reality. Especially in a system designed after the war to prevent totalitarism ever happening again (and the length any decision takes before being made is living proof of this). But of course, whatever I say, I must be one of Mr B's servants...
Nuts!
This personal repulsiveness is the outward expression of an even more repulsive and deeply dishonest approach to life and politics; so deeply dishonest that they themselves do not even know they are being dishonest.
Relating to "ourmaninferney"'s comment: the BBC is one of the most authoritative networks in the world and British people are aware of that; I'm quite positive that they are too smart to watch it turn into a propaganda agency as Italian TVs are without moving a finger...
I have just watched a long BBC report making a great fuss about the discovery that an Israeli soldier has been well treated as a prisoner of Hamas. There were ecstatic scenes, interviews with distant relatives, old videos showing us what a nice boy the Israeli soldier is. Whilst they did mention that in exchange for Hamas releasing this video, a number of Palestinian female political prisoners had been released from Israeli prisons, apart from that there was not onw word about them.
The BBC is one of the least credible news networks in the world, and this has been true ever since the mysterious death of Dr. David Kelly in July 2003, when the BBC was purged, Greg Dyke was forced to leave, and BBC journalists were effectively gagged.
The fact that the BBC is better than Berlusconi's RAI is hardly a valid comparison. Elsewhere on Italian television, La 5 for example, there are political debates that are a thousand times better, and far more serious, than anything anywhere on British television.
I guess not...
One day, a man walks into a whorehouse and says, ''Give me your most dangerous whore.''
The clerk says, ''She's in room 3A.''
The man goes to room 3A and sees a woman with a black leather suit, whips and chains. The whore says she wants to have sex on the peak of the roof. The man quickly agrees. They go to the roof and go at it for a while, and then they both fall off the roof, still ''together.'' They land on the sidewalk and die.
A drunk man walks by, sees them together, and walks into the whorehouse. The desk clerk says, ''Hey! I thought I told you never to come back here again! Get out, now!''
To this, the drunk replies, ''I just came in here to tell you that your sign fell down.''
Italians love hardcore dirty porn just like English people who are starved of love & sex.
stanleycorbett wrote:
Friday, 2 October 2009 at 07:43 am (UTC)
That is Ed Balls is trying very hard to get the Thames back on the track. Then there is an escape route.
English eat too many French.... chips ...are obese cannot reach the roof ...BBC CNN Larry King Riz Khan, ABC CBS we love you unzip the zipped and let us have the good as the unemployments are very high WE need jobs...
I thank you
Firozali A. Mulla
Italians love hardcore dirty porn just like English people who are starved of love & sex.
well, Annozero -TV show of the interview- is the only Italian TV show (not pay-tv) that have fully covered the news of the Italian PM sex scandal. By the way, days before the show Berlusconi and his mates attacked verbally the RAI tv show and its journalists. Moreover, a few months ago Augusto Minzolini, a former Italian press journalist, has been elected as the director of TG1, the first national TV news of RAI. As a result of this election, he took position against the "gossip" of the Italian PM sex scandal refusing to cover any news regarding Berlusconi and D'Addario call girl's affair. Just yesterday evening, he took again position on his TV news show TG1 against the Rome demonstration in favor of the Italian freedom of press by the Italian National Journalist league. Minzolini stated that the demonstration of the 3rd of October for the freedom of press in Italy was illogical because there is no evidence of such a freedom threat. The final conclusion is that Mediaset (3 Italian private TV channels) is owned by Berlusconi's son, RAI is the state broadcasting and it is in favor of government, however there are a maximum of 2 or 3 RAI TV shows like Annozero which HAVE TO be on air because Berlusconi and his mates can attack them of being "communists" and to show to Italy and the rest of the world that the Italian media system is free and without control by its PM.
Has really RAI the guts to stand up to the bully-boy tacticts? Ciao, Filippo
Most English women HALF her age don't look as good as that! (Must be why I'm marrying a German).
Anyway, it was predictable that this would happen sooner or later. 'As you make your bed, so must you lie upon it'.