Qaddafi's "Voluptuous" Nurse Speaks Out

Reporters have been camped outside the home of Oksana Balinskaya’s home in the Ukraine ever since she left Libya, chiefly because she was one of the sole “sexy” aspects of the generally gruesome events in Libya.

Balinskaya was made famous by a U.S. diplomat remarking in a Wikileaks cable that Muammar “Gaddafi relies heavily on his long-time Ukrainian nurse, Galyna Kolotnytska, who has been described as a ‘voluptuous blonde.'” It is undoubtedly a source of disappointment to global media that said nurse is no longer blonde and not interested in flaunting her alleged voluptuousness. Or that they either got her name wrong or were referring to a different Ukrainian nurse.

This nurse did grant an as-told-to to Newsweek. She writes of the salacious rumors surrounding her existence:

The Ukrainian press called us Gaddafi’s harem. That’s nonsense. None of us nurses was ever his lover; the only time we ever touched him was to take his blood pressure. The truth is that Papik was much more discreet than his friend, the womanizer Silvio Berlusconi. Gaddafi chose to hire only attractive Ukrainian women, most probably for our looks. He just liked to be surrounded by beautiful things and people.

But those “things and people” lived precarious lives, constantly watched and subject to his whims. Balinskaya doesn’t mention leaving because there was about to be a civil war, or even because she could no longer ignore that her boss was not a very nice guy. She had personal reasons:

I got out of Tripoli at the beginning of February, just in time. Two of my friends stayed behind, and now they can’t leave. I had a very personal reason for wanting to get out: I was four months pregnant, and I was beginning to show. I feared that Papik would not approve of my Serbian boyfriend.