Getty Image
86-year-old billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy and owner of AC Monza since 2018, made quite a promise to his players at the team’s Christmas dinner on Tuesday.
In a video published on Wednesday, Berlusconi told his soccer team, “We have found a good coach, kind and able to stimulate our boys. I’ve also given the players extra motivation and told them that if we beat Milan, Juve? If you win against one of these big clubs, I’ll bring them a bus full of prostitutes to the locker room.”
#Berlusconi, l’uscita infelice alla cena di Natale del #Monza: “Un camion di t…” 🔥#tuttosport #SerieA #Galliani #Palladino pic.twitter.com/Wa8xI30aK0
— Tuttosport (@tuttosport) December 13, 2022
Naturally, his comment immediately caused a stir with many denouncing his bawdy talk.
Reuters reports one of those he angered was Daniela Sbrollini, a senator from the centrist Italia Viva party, who said it was the “usual misogynist language from Berlusconi. A joke in bad taste that leaves you speechless.”
Doubling down on his comment after the outrage it sparked, Silvio Berlusconi later wrote on Instagram, “Frankly, I didn’t think, and no one could have imagined, that a simple playful and clearly paradoxical ‘locker room’ joke that I told to my Monza players could arouse comments that were as malevolent as they were trivial and unrealistic. I pity these critics.
“Maybe it’s just their utter lack of humor that makes them so sad and yet so gratuitously mean to attack those they consider enemies. But it is Christmas. So I wish them all the best too.”
Considering that 10 years ago Berlusconi was sentenced to seven years in prison for paying for sex with an underage girl at one of his infamous “bunga bunga” parties, it’s certainly not outrageous for some people to have taken him literally. (He was later acquitted on appeal in 2015 when a judge ruled that he did not know she was a minor at the time of the offense.)
That and the fact that since 1989 he has also been accused of *deep breath* abuse of office; bribery and corruption of police officers, judges and politicians; collusion; defamation; embezzlement; extortion; false accounting; money laundering; perjury; tax fraud; and witness tampering.