Clooney says meeting Berlusconi ‘most astonishing evening of my life’

London: George Clooney has revealed that meeting Silvio Berlusconi was “one of the more astonishing evenings of his life.”

The Hollywood star said he went to Rome in 2008 to talk to the Italian prime minister about the possibility of Italy sending helicopters to Darfur in Sudan to help with the relief effort. But Berlusconi, 75, was more interested in inviting him to a party and showing him a double bed which Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, gave him as a present. “I’ve had one evening with Berlusconi and it was one of the more astonishing evenings of my life,” the Telegraph quoted Clooney as telling the website of Time magazine in a video interview. “I went to speak about Darfur. I’d done all my homework. (Afterwards) he took me to see his bedroom and the bed that Putin had given him. “There are so many jokes, there’s so little time,” he said, to laughter from the audience. “It became a very different evening than anyone thought. I was like ‘I have to go’ and he was saying ‘No where are you going, there’s going to be a party’, and I was like, ‘No I gotta go, I really do.” The prime minister’s lawyers want Clooney to appear as a witness in Berlusconi’s ongoing trial for abuse of office and paying for sex with an under age prostitute. They want the star to refute claims by the teenager, an exotic nightclub dancer whose nickname is Ruby the Heart Stealer, that he was at one of the premier’s “bunga bunga” sex parties in Milan. Berlusconi has denied all charges related to the case. Clooney said he has never attended one of the parties and would be happy to give evidence on behalf of the prime minister. “I spoke to their people and said, ‘I will come and testify if you’d like,’ because I wasn’t at the party that I was said to have been at.” ANI