Did Berlusconi Have an Affair With Teenage Model?

ROME, May 26, 2009 — -- Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is angrily fighting back against an aggressive media investigation into the alleged inconsistencies in the details of his friendship with an 18-year-old amateur model. Lashing back at what he calls biased media attacks, he denies that he lied about his relationship with Noemi Letizia and was only trying to protect her and her family's privacy.

La Repubblica, the main center-left newspaper that is often at odds with Berlusconi and his right-leaning political party, The Popular People's Party, has published a list of ten questions that they say Berlusconi needs to clarify in order to clear any suspicions after the prime minister changed his account of how he first came to know Noemi. The calls for full disclosure have been echoed by major press organizations throughout Europe.

The story first appeared in the Italian press when Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, sent an open letter to another Italian paper criticizing her husband's choice of female candidates for the upcoming European elections as unqualified. She also bitterly complained that he had attended Noemi's 18th birthday party in Naples while he never bothered to attend those of his own children. Lario called her husband "unwell" and implied that his attraction to beautiful younger women was causing him to make bad decisions.

The battle of the Berlusconis played out in the press and Lario asked for a divorce. Initially in interviews conducted by ABC News with Rome residents, most Italians shrugged off the divorce and the titillating details as a private matter. But Berlusconi's original explanation that he went to the party because he happened to be in Naples that evening and had a spare hour or so has been disputed by the Italian press after interviews with people involved.

The prime minister's relationship to Noemi's father, Elio Letizia, described as a friendship, is also in dispute, as is the father's supposed membership of Berlusconi's People's Freedom Party. This has raised doubts about why Berlusconi would have visited on the night of Noemi's 18th birthday party to discuss the candidates for the upcoming elections; the original explanation that was given in response to Lario's complaint. Letizia said in later interviews that Berlusconi first met Noemi when she was 10 years old. He said that Berlusconi had sent a hand-written letter of condolence when their son was killed in a car accident eight years ago and that they have stayed in touch since.