Ah Italia! Such a great place to get your head round great art and great women but what a crappy little country. How else can you describe a place that condemns a 76-year-old man to seven years in jail and bans him for life from public office for a crime that both he and his victim deny — a crime to which there were no witnesses and for which there is no evidence?
That is what has just happened in Milan in the infamous Bunga Bunga trial at which three women judges (and no jury) found the media tycoon and three times prime minister guilty on Monday of ‘prostituzione minorile’ (Berlusconi of course is appealing).
According to the prosecution, Silvio Berlusconi — known as ‘Il Cavaliere’, the knight — paid Karima El-Mahroug — known as ‘Ruby Rubacuori’, Ruby the Heart-Stealer — for sex during a four-month period at the start of 2010, when he was prime minister and she was 17. In the land of the Latin lover, the age of consent is 14 but it is illegal to pay a girl for sex until she is 18.
Yes, Berlusconi paid Ruby money (she was present 13 times at his infamous parties and received €3,000 a time). He pays dozens of women money. So what? Is that proof of prostituting a minor? About 30 young women who were also paid regularly by Berlusconi to grace the parties at his villa outside Milan appeared as witnesses in the two-year trial to say that they had never seen any sex at those parties or him having sex with anyone, let alone the nubile Moroccan.
Perhaps it is also worth bearing in mind that at the time he was 74 and, even though an Italian, a prostate-cancer survivor.
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