“BARIGATE”, the call girl scandal involving Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, refuses to go away. Italian news weekly L’Espresso has posted on its website (www.espresso.repubblica.it) transcriptions of phonecalls involving call girl Patrizia D’Addario as well as a recording she allegedly made during a night spent with the prime minister at his Rome residence in November.
Last week Rome daily La Repubblica reported that investigators have now questioned 19 women who, for a fee, had attended parties at the prime minister’s private residences, accusing Mr Berlusconi of being a “sultan” for whom orgies were organised.
The transcriptions published by L’Espresso would seem to confirm not just those claims but also the testimony of Patrizia D’Addario who claims to have spent the night of November 11th, the night of the US presidential election count, with the prime minister.
Yesterday L’Espresso carried details of a conversation between Ms D’Addario and Gianpaolo Tarantini, the Bari health services contractor at the centre of the investigation and the man accused of having “supplied” women for Mr Berlusconi’s parties. The conversation is dated “October”:
Gianpaolo Tarantini: “I’ve already paid you €1,000. Then if you spend the night with him, he’ll make you a present himself. By the way, he doesn’t use condoms, okay?”
Patrizia D’Addario: “I’m not going to do it without protection, how can I trust that?”
GT: “But, this is Berlusconi.”
PD: “What do you know? Just think how many people have ended up.”
GT: “Do you know how many medical exams he undergoes?”
PD: “I know, but.”
GT: “You decide but remember he is not going to have you as call girl, rather as a friend of mine that I brought to him.”
L’Espresso has also published transcriptions of the recording Ms D’Addario alleges she made during the night she spent with Mr Berlusconi at his Rome residence of Palazzo Grazioli.
The transcription appears to record the two of them getting ready to go to bed:
SB: “I’m going to take a shower as well, so you wait for me in the big bed, if you finish first.”
PD: “Which big bed? The Putin one?”
SB: “The Putin bed.”
PD: “How nice, it has those curtains”.
The “Putin bed” is allegedly a reference to a four-poster double bed given to Mr Berlusconi as a present by the former Russian president Vladimir Putin. In other parts of the transcriptions, Ms D’Addario claims that the next time she meets Mr Berlusconi, he wants her to bring “a friend”. She also tells Mr Tarantini that the 72-year-old prime minister wants to see her “licked” by a female friend of his.
Opposition reaction has not been slow. Senior Democratic Party (PD) figure Paolo Gentiloni accused Mr Berlusconi of lying, saying that the L’Espresso tapes had “re-established the reality of the facts and the pathetic lies told to hide that reality”. In response, Mr Berlusconi’s lawyer (and PDL deputy) Niccolò Ghedini issued a statement claiming that the tapes “have no value, seem totally improbable and are the fruit of invention”.