It is widely believed in Italy that Silvio Berlusconi seeks influence to resist the legal battles - including having allegedly had sex with an under-age prostitute - that he still faces.

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In that trial, Lord Archer successfully sued the Star newspaper over allegations that he had slept with a prostitute.

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When the school-boyish English actor was arrested in June 1995 for picking up a Hollywood prostitute, many suspected that at 34 his career was over.

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Mr. GREG ARAKI (Filmmaker): Everything is so nuanced, and all the characters, including the coach and including the johns that Neil sleeps with as a young male prostitute, they're seen as these sort of flawed human beings, but they're all given a humanity and a depth, that they're not just these black and white kind of cardboard bad boys and good guys.

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Despite his clashes with Italian justice over corruption charges, and the fact that he is still on trial for allegedly paying an underage prostitute for sex, Mr Berlusconi is using his considerable political skills to appeal to an electorate which has seen a draconian increase in taxes by the technocrat administration led by Mario Monti during 2012, our correspondent says.

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The Times also quoted a person--who had been briefed about a federal investigation--as saying that Spitzer had been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a prostitute at a Washington, D.

FORBES: Sheriff Shot Down

With Paolo Bonacelli as a priest who urges the assassin to take God into his heart, and the beautiful Violante Placido as a prostitute who falls in love with the assassin after he performs an act of sexual gallantry that no man experienced with prostitutes would likely perform.

NEWYORKER: The American