Patrizia D'Addario, Italian Escort, Says She Was "Threatened And Attacked After Meeting Silvio Berlusconi"
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ROME — The prostitute at the center of Premier Silvio Berlusconi's sex scandal claims in a new book that she slept with him on the understanding he would help her set up a countryside inn but she got "nothing" in return.
Patrizia D'Addario, whose memoir went on sale Tuesday in Italy, writes she feels betrayed and has been frightened by strange threats, including the ransacking of her home, since she revealed this year that she had taped-recorded her purported bedroom encounter with Berlusconi.
In "Gradisca, Presidente," (At Your Pleasure, Premier), D'Addario elaborates on her earlier accounts of the night she spent with Berlusconi in his Rome residence. The conservative leader has said he has never paid for sex and is the victim of someone seeking to create a scandal.
D'Addario says she gave Berlusconi her body hoping he would help her open a countryside inn in southern Italy, where she was raised. In the book she documents how her efforts to open the hotel had been stymied over the years by Italy's bureaucracy.
The 73-year-old media mogul's wife, Veronica Lario, said last spring she is divorcing Berlusconi for what she called his infatuation with attractive young women.
"(Berlusconi) didn't pay me. It wasn't money he had to give me, he promised me something else," D'Addario writes in the book. "I gave him my body, he (gave me) nothing."
A left-leaning newsweekly L'Espresso obtained what it said were the tapes made by D'Addario. In the tapes, a man identified as Berlusconi is heard telling the woman to wait for him on the big bed while he showers.
In the memoir, which stretches back to an unhappy childhood, D'Addario writes that since she revealed that she had made a tape recording of the encounter, she has been the subject of threats, aggression and other "strange episodes," including the ransacking of her home.
"They take away everything, from panties to dresses, from stockings to bras, from jewelry to shoes, from CDs to my diaries, to my address book, the computer. They only leave me a very expensive TV," D'Addario writes.
"Now I am really frightened," D'Addario writes.
She says she reported the theft to local police.
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Richard Owen 11/24/09 09:30 AM ET Associated Press