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 Monday.
Prosecutors hope testimony from the actress-turned-human-rights activist and from Campbell’s estranged former modeling agent will help tie Taylor to the illicit “blood diamond” trade that fueled Sierra Leone’s civil war. Both contradicted Campbell’s account from the witness stand last week that she did not know the nature or value of what she had received.
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.
Defense lawyers accused the prosecution of calling the unlikely witnesses as a publicity stunt to raise the profile of the trial, which has gone on for more than two years.
