Berlusconi daughter comes to his defense

ROME — Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s eldest daughter has come to her father’s defense, saying he’s been “stabbed in the back” by months of “slanderous” newspaper revelations about his sex life.

Marina Berlusconi’s comments, in an interview Friday with the Corriere della Sera, came a day after Berlusconi again denied having ever paid anyone for sex and brushed off suggestions he might resign because of the scandal.

Prosecutors in the southern city of Bari, meanwhile, said the premier doesn’t figure into their investigations into a local businessman who has admitted to paying women — including a prostitute — to attend the premier’s parties.

The businessman, Giampaolo Tarantini, has said he merely reimbursed the women for their travel expenses and brought them to Berlusconi’s dinner parties to show off. He has apologized to Berlusconi and said the premier never knew the women had been paid.

“From what has been published in the newspapers, it’s clear that (Berlusconi) is absolutely removed from any penal responsibility,” Prosecutor Antonio Laudati said Thursday.

Berlusconi has been under fire for months since his wife, Veronica Lario, announced she was divorcing him because of his fondness for younger women.

On Friday, Marina Berlusconi — the premier’s eldest daughter from his first marriage — dismissed suggestions that Lario had started the campaign by going public with her accusations.

The younger Berlusconi, who heads the Mondadori publishing house in the premier’s media empire, said her father had been subject to a “lynching” by relentless newspaper reports that were nothing more than “inflammatory slander.”

“I know perfectly well how precious freedom of the press is because I’m also an editor,” she told Corriere. “But someone seems to have forgotten that every freedom has a precise limit.”

Her father, she said, was also entitled to a right to privacy.

“Sometimes, it has seemed that more than below-the-belt hits there have been true attempts to stab him in the back,” she said. “Good thing my father has his reflexes ready.”

On Thursday, during a joint news conference with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Berlusconi voiced a similar disdain for the left-leaning newspapers that have been at the forefront in exposing the scandal.

Patrizia D’Addario, a prostitute, has said Tarantini paid her €1,000 ($1,400) to attend one of Berlusconi’s parties last year. She said she also spent the night with the premier another time and says tape recordings she made during the encounter prove it.

In the recordings, which were broadcast online by the left-leaning newsweekly L’Espresso, a man identified as Berlusconi is heard telling D’Addario to wait for him on the big bed while he showers.