28-year-old Francesca Pascale confirmed that she plans to marry the disgraced former Italian Prime Minister,77, according to the Boston Herald.

Silvio Berlusconi once described Francesca Pascale as “27 years old, with very solid values, beautiful on the outside and even more beautiful on the inside.” He said Francesca Pascale is “very close to” him and that she appreciates his daughter Marina and “loves her very much, too.”

Francesca Pascale actually became engaged to Silvio Berlusconi late last year but he was still technically married to his wife, so he legally couldn’t marry Francesca Pascale quite yet. Berlusconi is divorcing his second wife Veronica Lario, whom he married in 1990 and had three children with. Reuters reports that Lario filed for divorce in 2009. In the divorce documents, she accused Berlusconi of having an affair with a 17-year-old girl, which he denied. He is disputing a settlement with Lario that would cost him about 100,000 euros ($135,000) per day if confirmed by a court.

The media magnet is in the process of an appeal against a June conviction. He is accused of abuse of office and paying for sex with a minor. That innocent minor would be nightclub dancer Karima El Mahroug, better known under her stage name “Ruby the Heartstealer”. She has insisted under oath that she never had sex with Berlusconi. Both he and Francesca Pascale deny this sex ever took place, with her saying, “My president isn’t a saint, but he is absolutely unable to treat women like objects.”

In an interview, Pascale said she did not attend the so-called “bunga-bunga” parties where El Mahroug was present because “women threw themselves at him” and she could not have tolerated it .

Pascale grew up near the city of Naples. She met Berlusconi when she was only 21 because she had co-founded a club called “Silvio We Miss You” after he lost the prime minister’s office to Romano Prodi in 2006. “I immediately asked him if I could give him my phone number and I asked for his,” she said. “He told me: ‘You’re unscrupulous’.”

Francesca Pascale’s dreams of marriage to Silvio Berlusconi apparently started when she was less than 18 years old. Pascale met Silvio Berlusconi back in 2006 but he “completely rejected her” at the time, saying, “Don’t even talk about it, you’re too young, I can’t give you the future you deserve.” However, she won out in an “unending courtship” as she calls it:

“I was a minor when I set my sights on him. I sought him out, I courted him, I made him fall in love and then I became his girlfriend. I practically did and do everything: All he has to do is say ‘yes’.”

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