One of the young women who attended Silvio Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” parties told a court on Friday that she dressed up as a burlesque version of US President Barack Obama to entertain the former Italian prime minister.
In testimony during a trial against Berlusconi on charges of paying for sex with an underage prostitute, Marysthell Polanco said she had also dressed as prosecutor Ilda Boccassini.
Boccassini, known as “Ilda the Red” because of her hair colour and what Berlusconi says is her communist political sympathies, is one of the prosecutors in the ongoing trial. “I dressed up as Boccassini with a toga to make him laugh, and also as Obama,” said Polanco.
Polanco, a striking 28-year-old from the Dominican Republic, said the parties were innocent fun accompanied by burlesque, but not pornographic, entertainment.
In April, Berlusconi said the parties were “elegant dinners” where there was sometimes entertainment that he called a “burlesque game”. Previous witnesses who attended his parties painted a more sordid picture, including nudity, mimicked sex, and one described two women wearing nasty versions of nuns’ habits performing a raunchy pole dance.
Berlusconi is charged with paying Moroccan-born Karima El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was 17, and then abusing his powers by getting her freed from police custody after she was arrested for theft.