[imagesource:wikicommons]

The day he saw the king have sex with his mother is a childhood memory that will never leave Angel Cristo.

After decades of rumours and blackmail, the Spaniard has now finally released some of the footage between his mother and Spanish King Juan Carlos he was forced to capture, confirming speculation and rumours of a royal blackmail scandal years in the making.

Christo’s mother, TV presenter Barbara Rey, allegedly made her 13-year-old son set up a camera on a neighbour’s terrace to capture a liaison between her and the much-loved King of Spain on a sunny afternoon in 1994. Rey then allegedly used the images and recordings in order to blackmail the monarchy for millions.

Cristo also claims he made edited copies of an explicit video showing Reyand the then-king having sex in her bed. The footage was recorded on a secret video camera installed by his mother.

“I was only 13, but I was good with a camera,” he recalled in an interview with The Telegraph. “My mother said ‘What a pity you’re too young to help me with this. You couldn’t, though, could you?’”

At the time, Cristo felt uncomfortable being co-opted into his mother’s blackmail plot and its subsequent unravelling has proven those instincts correct.

Although he knew what he was being asked to do was wrong, his desire to help his mother resolve her financial problems convinced him. Estranged from his mother now, he believes that in hindsight it was a form of child abuse.

“She went on and on until I said ‘yes, I’ll do it’. She manipulated me.”

Rey is also accused of manipulating the Spanish government by using compromising pictures as leverage to get millions of pounds in hush money. Spain’s secret service reportedly paid her up to £3 million (R68 million) for her silence to avoid embarrassing the royal family.

But what was always a rumour was confirmed last month when Cristo sold some of the photos to the Dutch magazine Privé for what he said was “a very modest sum”.

 

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It’s been 10 years since Juan Carlos abdicated in favour of his own son, but the King is still seen by millions of Spaniards as the hero who saw off an attempted military coup and presided over an unprecedented era of expanded liberties and prosperity, culminating in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and Seville Expo.

In tapes of phone conversations with his mistress, recently published by the online news site OK Diario, Juan Carlos described his marriage to Queen Sofía as loveless after the birth of their third child, today’s King Felipe, in 1968.

“We have no family life,” Juan Carlos can be heard saying to Ms Rey in a phone conversation from the mid-1990s, explaining that the royal couple lived in separate apartments in Madrid’s Zarzuela palace.

“Between you and me, and being selfish, it’s very comfortable for me because the Queen performs her job to perfection. And on top of that, she puts up with the situation and doesn’t run off with another man.”

King Juan Carlos took up residence in Abu Dhabi after abdicating in 2014 following a spate of financial scandals and persistent rumours about his promiscuity.

Rey, now 74, has always refused to speak openly on her relationship with Juan Carlos, although she has often discussed having had a sentimental link with “a high official of the state”.

However, Emilio Alonso Manglano, who was head of the CESID secret service between 1981 and 1995, wrote in his diaries that Rey received large sums of money in return for not publicly revealing her affair with the king.

According to Manglano, secret service agents once delivered around 25 million pesetas (R2.8 million) in 10,000-peseta notes in a sports bag, and in 1997, a final deal was reached, in which the actress was paid 100 million pesetas (R11 million) by the government, plus a guarantee of receiving 50 million pesetas each year for a decade.

Under the agreement, Rey was meant to hand over all of the incriminating material but, according to her son, she kept copies in her safe beneath her father’s armchair in Totana, her hometown, and in a bank deposit box in Luxembourg.

Cristo also revealed his mother had also tasked him with taking paparazzi-style photographs of her having sex on a beach with Frank Frances, a later boyfriend of the actress. She allegedly planned to sell the photographs to a Spanish magazine.

“It’s strange to watch your mother with a man. It is a kind of child abuse.”

Plenty of Spanish journalists have in the past admitted to knowing about Rey’s affair with Juan Carlos, including the existence of photographs and tapes, most media bosses did not want to confront the powerful Crown by publishing such material.

“There was a consensus among the elites, the politicians and journalists to let the king do what he wanted. But even now it is shocking to hear him discussing matters of state with a woman like Barbara Rey. Any person who behaves like this is clearly a danger to his own system.”

Spain’s royal household, now led by Juan Carlos’s son Felipe VI, has stayed mum following the allegations and leaked pictures, and so too has Rey, who is a strong contender for worst mom ever.

It makes one wonder what other secrets the royals of the world have been keeping from their adoring subjects. This is one scandal though that sounds very much like a Blacklist episode: #64 The Bad Mother.

[source:telegraph]