I’ve been commenting on the public machinations and private peccadilloes of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for many years. And I’ve always been stupefied by the way he invariably escaped the consequences of his bad, if not illegal, behavior.
It is his reported schtupping of underage girls at these bacchanalian soirees that has finally ensnared him in a legal vice grip from which I doubt even he can escape.
Specifically, after years of watching him make a national spectacle of his dalliances with prostitutes (all perfectly legal if they are over 18), prosecutors filed charges yesterday alleging that he paid for sex with a 17-year-old Moroccan girl, and then abused his good offices to get her released from police custody on charges of petty theft.
(“Italian PM Berlusconi Caught in Sex Vice Grip,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 10, 2011)
Well, I warned that he had finally taken his Houdini-like flirtations with the law too far. Because here’s how he finally got his comeuppance yesterday:
A Milan court on Monday found former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi guilty of paying for sex with a minor and abusing his office to cover it up, handing him a seven-year jail sentence and banning him from public office for life.
‘I was really convinced that they would acquit me, because it was impossible to convict me based on the facts,’ Mr. Berlusconi wrote on his Facebook page.
‘Instead they issued an incredible verdict, of untold violence that has never been seen before, in order to eliminate me from the political life of this country.’
(New York Times, June 24, 2013)
Granted, one look at this “Ruby The Heartstealer” and it’s easy to see how the head (below) of any heterosexual man could have misled him to think she was of age. But “untold violence”?!
This should give you a sense of the ego and persecution complex that have made Berlusconi the most fascinating tragic hero in modern politics.
His persecution complex … causes him lament on occasion that he is ‘the person the most persecuted by the judiciary of all times, in all history…’
(‘The Self-Fulfilling Crucifixion of Slivio Berlusconi,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 19, 2009)
Mind you, the problem for Berlusconi is not that he will have to go to prison. After all, the Italian justice system is such that, notwithstanding convictions and sentences, “only poor people do time” for their crimes.
No, his only fear is that this verdict might be the opening of a black hole of prosecutions for his lifetime of alleged financial crimes that will systematically tear down his billion-dollar media empire as ruthlessly as he built it up.
In any event, I say good riddance to him:
The irony is not lost on me that it is a female judge who ruled today that prosecutors have established a prima facie case to subject this notorious chauvinist to an expedited trial for having sex with a minor, then trying to cover it up.
Not to mention that he will be tried before a panel of three judges, all of them women…
Forget poetic justice; karma, she’s a bitch!
(“Berlusconi Indicted!” The iPINIONS Journal, February 15, 2011)
Related commentaries:
Berlusconi vice grip…
Crucifixion…
Berlusconi resigns…