Berlusconi didn’t lay one finger on me, insists teenage belly dancer

LONDON - Despite telling a friend they had sex, the teenage belly dancer at the centre of an underage prostitution scandal involving Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has now insisted that he ‘never touched’ her.

Karima El Mahrough, 18, wept as she told one of Berlusconi’s TV channels that he ‘didn’t lay one finger on me’, reports the Daily Mail.

Her insistence was at odds with a witness statement that is part of a 390-page document that forms the prosecution case against him.

“Karima told me several times she was a friend of the prime minister and was a regular at his house where she ate, danced and had sex with him. He gave her a lot of money,” Mahrough’s friend Caterina Pasquino had recorded in it.

However, Mahrough, better known by her stage name ”Ruby the Heartbreaker’, has now denied that statement.

“I esteem him as a person and for helping me without anything in return. I did not spend three nights in a row there, she said.

In a previous interview, she had revealed how Berlusconi had given her a diamond necklace, 6,000 Euro and an Audi sports car after attending parties he hosted.

Prosecutors began their investigation after it emerged that Mahrough was just 17 when she was invited to a party at Berlusconi’s house and they believe she was one of several underage girls he had sex with.

The 74-year-old media tycoon is also being investigated for corruption after he put pressure on Milan police to release the teenager after she was arrested in connection with a 3,000 euro theft.

Mahrough was in tears as she insisted she was not an escort - despite a close call - and told the host: “My mother always told me you are born a prostitute and you don’t become one.”

“My uncles raped me when I was nine years old and when I told my mother she said not to tell my father or he would be angry as I was not a virgin anymore,” she said.

“When I was twelve my father poured boiling oil on me when I told him I had become Christian and I still have the scars on my head and shoulder,” she added. (ANI)