Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, already haunted by corruption allegations, said he may address parliament on "vile" reports over his links to a teenager at the heart of his public divorce, AFP reported.
Berlusconi, 72, hit out at critics and the media over his ties to Noemi Letizia in the wake of the announcement by his wife Veronica Lario that she was seeking a divorce after he turned up to fete the girl's 18th birthday bash.
"Explain to parliament my relationship with Noemi Letizia? I'm thinking about it," the billionaire tycoon told T9 television in one of a series of interviews ahead of European parliament elections in June.
"I am tempted to go before lawmakers to talk about it, but I'm mulling it over," he said.
His divorce has turned ugly since his wife's decision to end their marriage was splashed out in newspapers three weeks ago, with a report quoting Lario as saying that she could no longer be with a man who "cavorts with minors."
The conservative leader insists the girl is merely a good friend's daughter and has since demanded a public apology from Lario. He has accused the leftist opposition of launching a smear campaign less than a month before EU polls.
He again lashed out at the opposition on Saturday.
"First of all, I am letting them continue in order to let people see how they are. It will be like a boomerang for them," he told T9.
"They will be ashamed and they will lose the respect of voters, because in this case there is nothing improper," Berlusconi said.
Opposition leaders have called on Berlusconi to publicly address his relationship with Letizia after media accused him of lying about their ties.
"The behaviour of several newspapers has really been disgraceful, vile -- I would even say disgusting," he told Radiomontecarlo. "And when people will understand the real situation, several people will be ashamed."
La Repubblica newspaper has published a list of 10 questions that remain unanswered over Berlusconi's relationship with the young aspiring model, whose birthday party he attended bearing a gold and diamond necklace gift.
The questions include when they met and where and when they have seen each other since, and whether Berlusconi had similar relationships with other teenagers.
The scandal earned Berlusconi a reprimand from the Roman Catholic Church, which said a prime minister should behave with more sobriety.
The flamboyant leader is well-known for surrounding himself with attractive young women while Lario, his second wife who is 20 years his junior, has stayed mainly out of the public eye, but he has never been linked to a minor.
Lario also slammed Berlusconi publicly over a string of attractive young women with little political experience, including a former Miss Italy contestant, that he was considering as candidates for his centre-right People of Freedom party in the EU polls.
Another scandal returned to haunt the premier when a Milan court on Tuesday released its full reasoning for convicting Berlusconi's British tax lawyer David Mills for accepting a 600,000-dollar (440,000-euro) bribe from him in exchange for false testimony.
The conservative leader said he would appear before parliament to explain what he has thought "for a long time about a certain court" -- an allusion to the numerous legal cases that have dogged him since the mid-1990s.
The staunch anti-communist, who has fought charges including tax fraud, false accounting and illegally financing political parties, has repeatedly accused Milan's "red judges" of having it in for him.
Although some initial judgments have gone against Berlusconi, he has never been definitively convicted.
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