LEIDSCHENDAM, Netherlands – Naomi Campbell flirted with Liberia’s former president across the dinner table at Nelson Mandela’s presidential mansion in 1997 and boasted the following morning that Charles Taylor had given her a huge diamond during the night, Mia Farrow and another witness testified at Taylor’s war crimes trial yesterday.Prosecutors hope testimony from the actress-turned-human rights activist and from Campbell’s estranged former modelling agent will help tie Taylor to the illicit “blood diamond” trade that fuelled Sierra Leone’s civil war. Both contradicted Campbell’s account from the witness stand last week that he did not know the nature or value of what she had received.The episode was a surreal interlude of glamour in a grim case focused on murder and mutilation in the jungles of West Africa.Taylor has dismissed suggestions he was involved in the diamond trade as “complete, complete nonsense.”Farrow, however, recounted what she called the “unforgettable” memory of an excited Campbell coming down for breakfast the morning after Mandela’s dinner party, so excited she could hardly sit. “She said ‘Oh my God, last night I was awakened by men knocking at the door and it was men sent by Charles Taylor and he sent me a huge diamond’,” Farrow said.Campbell, who resisted appearing before the war-crimes court for months, testified under subpoena Thursday that she was given several small “dirty-looking” stones by men she didn’t know after the function in Pretoria.The British model said she hadn’t known they were diamonds, nor who had sent them, and said Farrow was the one who suggested the gift was from Taylor.Taylor’s chief counsel, Courtenay Griffiths, said Farrow was unlikely to accurately remember what happened at a breakfast 13 years ago. He noted that Campbell received three uncut diamonds – not thesingle diamond Farrow insisted she heard Campbell talk about.The defence also suggested Farrow’s credibility was tainted by her activism, particularly her campaigns for the victims of Africa’s wars.Farrow, 65, conceded she had never seen the diamond or diamonds herself, and that Campbell might not have used the word “huge.” But she insisted remembering Campbell only mentioned a single diamond.In court, Judge Julia Sebutinde asked Farrow whether it was possible she might have seen the 2006 movie Blood Diamond and been influenced by its plot, which centres on a single large diamond.But Farrow denied any suggestion that she was confusing reality with Hollywood.Agent Carole White, who fell out with Campbell several years ago, told the court that Taylor and her then-client enjoyed each other’s company at the dinner table.“I think she was flirting with him and he was flirting back,” she said. But under cross examination, Griffiths strongly challenged White’s testimony.“You have a very powerful motive for lying,” he said, noting that White was suing Campbell for millions of dollars over an alleged breach of contract. (AP)
