By Emma Bubola
Hardly a night goes by that Karima el-Mahroug does not think of what her life would be like if she had never met Silvio Berlusconi.
Fourteen years ago, el-Mahroug, then 17 and known as nightclub dancer Ruby Heart-Stealer, suddenly found herself at the center of a national scandal and global tabloid frenzy. Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time, was accused of paying her for sex during bacchanals he hosted at his villa near Milan in what became known as “Bunga Bunga” parties.
She denied it. He denied it. A court eventually acquitted him — and then he died. But the saga is not over for el-Mahroug, now 31 and desperate to move on.
“He messed up my life,” she said last week as she prepared to face yet another court hearing, she hopes the last. That hearing, on Monday, could determine if the case against her in the scandal will be dropped or move forward, keeping her life in suspended animation. She and other women in the case were accused of covering up for Berlusconi and receiving hush money for their alleged lies in court to protect him.
El-Mahroug acknowledges that she attended and danced at Berlusconi’s parties and returned repeatedly, receiving about 40,000 euros (about $44,000) as well as jewelry. But she denies breaking any laws and chalks up her behavior to her youth and need for money after a difficult childhood.
More than a year after the death of Berlusconi — a brash media mogul turned politician who dominated the country for nearly three decades — he remains a potent presence.
His face is on stamps and campaign posters for his party, on cellphone covers, mugs and T-shirts. Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s prime minister, years after he brought the marginalized post-fascist political movement in which she was reared into the mainstream. And both supporters and detractors see his enduring influence in the country’s more raucous politics; in television shows that some see as freeing and others as vulgar and sexist; and in an economy that he sought to modernize but is still largely stuck.
“Italy has a Berlusconian imprint,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.
Berlusconi’s long shadow has for years affected el-Mahroug, who came to Italy as a child from Morocco.
She has spent nearly half of her life as the object of media obsession as three different trials related to Berlusconi’s parties wended their way through the justice system. All the court cases bear her nickname, Ruby.
In the first trial, Berlusconi was accused of paying for sex with el-Mahroug, a minor, and abusing his office to cover it up. He was initially found guilty, but was later acquitted because of a lack of evidence that he was aware she was underage. In the second, several of Berlusconi’s associates were convicted of aiding and abetting prostitution by procuring women for the Bunga Bunga parties.
The last trial, focused on the accusations of hush money, involves about 20 women, including el-Mahroug. The women were acquitted by a lower court on procedural grounds, but prosecutors in Milan appealed the decision. The hearing Monday will address that appeal.
Some of the women who took part in the parties admit taking money or expensive gifts from Berlusconi, but they say he was not trying to buy their silence. Instead, they say, he had always been generous with them, even before the cases were opened, or he was compensating them for the damage the case inflicted on their lives and reputations.
According to wiretapped conversations reported in court documents, el-Mahroug said she had asked Berlusconi for 5 million euros in exchange for helping him in his trial. But in the interview last week, she denied receiving that sum and said that she had felt desperate at the time from the media attention and would have said anything by phone.
The other women in the case include a former Russian beauty queen who says she was Berlusconi’s longtime girlfriend and now lives in Thailand, a former “Big Brother” reality show contestant who is now a budding padel instructor, and a law school graduate.
They ended up in the middle of a scandal that, for many Italians, became emblematic of Berlusconi’s debasement of Italy’s top office, a general degradation of Italian politics to a sordid tabloid story, and his enemies’ single-minded zeal to take him down, even posthumously.
Even as his critics used the women as Exhibit A to show what they called Berlusconi’s depravity, the women say his enemies themselves reduced them to political ammunition.
“They killed me to get to him,” el-Mahroug said.
After the case exploded, she focused on raising a daughter she had with her boyfriend when she was 19 in Genoa. She later started a long-term relationship with a man who runs a health food restaurant there, and opened a beauty clinic that focuses on Botox injections and fillers — what she called her dream job.
But the scandal follows her.
A Google search for her name still shows provocative pictures of her, which she regrets, that were taken when she was not yet 18 and were splashed on newspaper front pages when the scandal broke. People on the street and in restaurants, and even her daughter’s friends, sometimes call her Ruby.
El-Mahroug said she had worked hard to prepare her daughter Sofia, now 12, for the teasing and worse that she expects to come Sofia’s way, despite the fact that the man at the center of the drama, Berlusconi, is gone.
“Knowing him cost me a lot,” she said.
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