The Scandals in Monaco Keep Coming
Before his marriage in 2011 to the South African swimmer Charlene Wittstock, Albert, the playboy prince of Monaco, upheld the traditions of a dysfunctional family that has been defined by scandal and intrigue for seven centuries. His marriage seemed a turning point, an opportunity to right the ship not just of his own life but of his homeland. But now, 15 years after he ascended the throne and several scandals later, there is a new one, perhaps the most outrageous of all—a story that involves an anonymous Brazilian, dueling lawyers in Milan and Paris, a Vladimir Putin cameo, and the worst sinus infection in the history of mankind.
When Albert II succeeded his father as the Sovereign Prince of Monaco in 2005, he made a bold pledge. For decades the tiny principality—a gaudy jewel on the French republic’s south coast—had become synonymous with grift, gambling, and questionable banking practices. Somerset Maugham, the British writer and resident of nearby Nice, once described the French Riviera, which includes the 700-year-old casino state, as a “sunny place for shady people.”
“Pas plus!” cried Albert, the half-American son of Prince Rainier III, who led Monaco’s Grimaldi dynasty for more than half a century, and Grace Kelly, who sprinkled stardust over what had long been a constitutional relic. “I will fight with all my strength for Monaco to be beyond reproach,” Albert said in his accession speech. His government in the glitzy tax haven, which is smaller than Central Park and has a population under 40,000, would be guided by “morality, honesty, and ethics.”
But the billionaire bachelor had perhaps not applied the same propriety to his personal life. No sooner had he ascended to the throne than decades of his own fast living came back to bite him in the royal derriere. Fifteen years later it’s still biting. And the latest scandal, which involves yet another paternity claim, hangs darkly over Albert’s principality.
Almost four decades after her death in a car crash, Grace Kelly still lends Monaco a degree of status in the popular imagination that dwarfs its geopolitical importance. Albert knows this, and he has long sought to keep the stardust falling; he oversaw the design of a $50,000-a-night Princess Grace Suite at Monaco’s storied H?tel de Paris Monte-Carlo, which reopened after refurbishment in 2019. Yet for all his efforts, Albert, whose wife initially brought a more modern brand of glamour to his rule, seems unable to get out of his own way. And the latest allegations are yet another threat to his moral, modernizing mission.
In 2005, weeks after Prince Albert completed his accession at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a cover story in Paris Match stunned France. Across 10 pages, the gossipy French magazine (and bible of Monégasque intrigue) revealed that the bachelor prince had a secret love child. Alexandre was born in late 2002, the product of a relationship that began in 1997 with Nicole Coste (née Tossoukpé), a flight attendant from Togo in West Africa. The prince had asked for her phone number during an Air France flight from Nice to Paris.
In 2005 Albert accepted the boy, now 18, as part of his family—and fortune. But not the line of succession, which Rainier had cannily changed by constitutional amendment in 2002 to include siblings as heirs if they had children. (Albert has two sisters, one of whom, Stéphanie, has had relationships, marriages, and three children with, variously, two bodyguards, an elephant trainer, and a Portuguese circus acrobat.) Monaco’s constitution excludes children born out of wedlock.
In 2006 a DNA test confirmed the claims of a former waitress from California, Tamara Rotolo, who had for years insisted that her daughter Jazmin was the result of a brief encounter with Prince Albert in 1991, while she was on holiday in France. Rotolo’s attempts to seek child support through the courts had come to naught. Her daughter, then 14, was having a normal day at her school near Palm Springs when Albert’s lawyers announced that she had been formally recognized as a member of a billionaire royal family halfway around the world. Now 29, Jazmin Grace Grimaldi (who did not reply to emails for this story) is an actress and singer.
In the space of a year, a playboy prince and committed bachelor had risen to the throne and admitted to having two illegitimate children. Further paternity claims—valid or not—were perhaps inevitable. “One day Albert told me, ‘Oh, if I listened to all the claims, I would have more children than anybody else in the world,’ ” Stéphane Bern tells me. Bern is a prominent French TV presenter who has been close to the prince since 1989. “Sometimes I make jokes about it. I say that I’m too old to be his son, and he laughs.”
But new claims are different—and less amusing—because Albert is 63 and no longer a bachelor. His 2011 wedding to Wittstock (now Princess Charlene of Monaco), who is 20 years his junior, reportedly cost $55 million. Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, and Naomi Campbell were guests. The couple had twins, Jacques and Gabriella, in 2014, finally putting to rest any succession concerns.
Yet even in the run-up to the wedding, rumors swirled of another love child. The French weekly news magazine L’Express published claims—strongly denied by the couple and Albert’s lawyers—that Charlene, who cried during her wedding, had attempted to “escape” the principality, once after traveling to Paris for a bridal gown fitting. “People see from outside that you are living a fairy tale, but life is always knocking at your door,” Bern says.
Mariza S, as she is being called for the purpose of potential court proceedings, according to the Telegraph newspaper in the UK and the German magazine Bunte, is a Brazilian woman who is now in her mid-thirties and lives in Italy. She has thick black curly hair and claims that she caught Prince Albert’s eye in a nightclub in Rio in 2004.
According to the Telegraph and Bunte, legal documents filed in Milan by a lawyer with a confusing name (Erich Grimaldi, who tells me Mariza found him on Facebook, is not related to the Grimaldis of Monaco) allege that Mariza, then 20, did not recognize the prince. She says he told her he was a Canadian lawyer and diplomat.
What follows is a tale that Albert’s lawyer dismisses as pure fiction. According to Mariza, as detailed in Bunte’s reporting on her legal filings, she and Albert engaged in an extraordinary two-week globetrotting tryst, flying from Rio to Lisbon and then to Milan, where Mariza says she applied for a visa to travel to Moscow, via Monaco. In the Russian capital, Mariza says she recalls meeting President Putin alongside her “diplomat” paramour, before she was eventually put on a plane back to Rio, via Amsterdam.
Nine months later Mariza allegedly had a daughter, known in the proceedings as Celia, as reported in the Telegraph and Bunte. It was at this point, apparently, that Mariza claims Albert stopped responding to messages. She says she continued to think he was a Canadian diplomat until she recognized him years later in an Italian gossip magazine.
Mariza began a fight for recognition and support. When direct messages to the palace’s official Instagram account went unanswered, Celia, according to news reports, sent the prince a letter last September. “Queride Papai” (Dear Daddy), the letter begins, handwritten in Portuguese and reproduced by the German news company RTL. “When I was five or six years old, I kept asking my mother where you are and why you are not with us…but I never got an answer from her… I don’t understand why I grew up without a father, and now that I’ve found you, you don’t want to see me.”
When I manage to reach Grimaldi, Mariza’s lawyer, he’s speeding across Milan on a Vespa. In broken English, and in translated text messages, he tells me that the case is delayed. A court hearing had been scheduled for February, when the prince was due to be summoned for an “acknowledgment of paternity.” But, speaking in March, Grimaldi says the prince’s lawyers have pleaded sovereign immunity. At the time of writing, Grimaldi was hoping a judge would reject the plea, and he was waiting for the case to come back to court, which he said should happen imminently.
Grimaldi says he is unable to share documents related to the case, but he claims evidence exists to back up Mariza’s memories of a journey across Europe. The lawyer, who is more used to contract law and credit recovery, says Mariza simply wants a DNA test. He is not intimidated by his royal adversary. “As far as I’m concerned, it makes no difference if my counterpart is a prince, a king, a president of state, a politician, or an entrepreneur,” he says.
Thierry Lacoste, Prince Albert’s longtime lawyer, has dismissed Mariza’s story as a “sham” and “blackmail” in the French magazine Le Point. In a statement from his Paris office, Lacoste tells me “the claims before the Italian courts are totally unfounded.” Sovereign immunity, he added, was “perfectly classic for a head of state as part of the defense package.”
Yet Mariza’s allegation is not the only thing now fueling Monaco’s giant gossip mills. In December, Princess Charlene shocked royal observers at a charity event when, above a gold-sequined face mask, she revealed that the blond locks on one side of her head had been shaved off. Was it a sign of inner turmoil? Not so, she indicated in January in an interview with one of her husband’s biographers, Isabelle Rivère; she just liked the style.
And yet, around the same time, Princess Charlene reportedly skipped an official meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron. Then in May she flew alone to South Africa for what was supposedly going to be a week, only to stay away from Monaco for months. Doctors, she said, had warned her against flying home lest a pressurized private jet aggravate a sinus infection related to a dental implant procedure. (Albert and her children made a visit to South Africa in August.)
By early September, Charlene had still not returned, and she was not expected to do so until October, at the earliest. As rumors -mushroomed, an exasperated Albert granted an interview with his biographer Peter Mikelbank. “She didn’t go into exile. It was absolutely just a medical problem which had to be treated,” Albert told Mikelbank in People magazine in September. While not referring to Mariza directly, Charlene insisted in January, before her South African isolation, that she was happy, and she expressed full support for her husband. “When my husband has problems, he tells me about it,” she told Rivère. “I often tell him, ‘No matter what, I’m a thousand percent behind you. I’ll stand by you whatever you do, in good times or in bad.’ ”
The intense interest in the latest paternity case reflects an appetite for Monégasque intrigue that predates Albert’s playboy past. Bad times have long been a feature of life in Monaco, more than 700 years after Fran?ois Grimaldi seized a fortress and established a family fiefdom. (While Monaco today is a member of the United Nations, it is a sovereign city-state that depends on the protection of France.)
Albert’s father, Prince Rainier III, once had to fight off an attempted coup by his own older sister, Princess Antoinette, Baroness of Massy, who was herself married three times. She wanted to declare herself regent, securing the throne for herself and her son. Monaco remained a constitutional anomaly, existing partly to satisfy an interest in royalty as fantasy in a country that had beheaded its own king in 1793. “Monaco is for French people a sort of substitution monarchy,” Bern told me.
Rainier’s marriage to Grace Kelly scuppered Antoinette’s schemes. That he married into Hollywood royalty also propelled Monaco from a French pre-occupation into glittering global notoriety. “Grace Kelly’s mother thought her daughter was about to marry a prince from Morocco,” Bern says. “She had never even heard of Monaco.”
The wedding, in 1956, was a sensation, attracting 1,500 journalists. MGM broadcast it live to more than 30 million people. The 700 guests included Cary Grant, David Niven, and Aristotle Onassis. Rainier, who had become ruler in 1949, described it as “the biggest circus in history.”
Princess Grace helped change Monaco’s reputation, yet the couple’s glamour and fame only intensified the pressure on their heirs. As the only son, arriving between two sisters, Albert had a destiny hung over him like a heavily jeweled sword of Damocles.
Having a tough, critical father didn’t help. “Prince Rainier always told me, ‘I’m not sure my son is ready,’ ” Bern recalls. “And then when I spoke to Albert, he said, ‘If I say I’m ready, my father will be upset. If I say I’m not ready, people will think I’m a stupid boy. So I can’t say anything.’ He had to be silent and experience his own life with girls and sport.”
Albert made the most of immense privilege and dashing good looks while he waited for the inevitable to happen. He was (and remains, Bern says) a likable man, and he was a popular figure at Amherst, where he studied from 1977 to 1981.
Bruce McInnes, then leader of Amherst’s Glee Club, remembered a laid-back prince with a fine baritone voice. McInnes once entertained Prince Rainier and Princess Grace at his home after a concert at the Massachusetts college, and he conducted a performance at the cathedral in Monaco during a European tour. David Niven and Yul Brynner attended.
“We became good friends,” McInnes, who died in April at the age of 85, wrote in an email. “There were many times when he would get late night hunger pangs and would telephone me and walk the short distance to my house for a grilled cheese sandwich or—forgive the language—a ‘shitburger’, which consisted of a very messy, grossly oversize cheeseburger, grilled onions, and a fried egg. Several of his buddies would come along for these gustatory delights!
“I will always remember Albert as a real gentleman—not at all arrogant, never flaunting his position in life… He certainly knew something of what lay ahead for him, but at Amherst he was—as much as possible—just one of the boys.”
But speculation about Albert’s love life—and appetite for more than dirty burgers—was exceptional even by the standards of the Grimaldis. He has been linked to such high-profile women as Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer, while his perennial bachelorhood inevitably inspired gossipy speculation about his sexuality.
Bern suspects the pressure on Albert—and any future wife—might have driven him to seek relationships without commitments, free from impossible comparisons. “I think when you are the product of such an incredible love story between a glamorous star and a prince, you find yourself in a difficult position to do it again,” Bern says. “Perhaps,” he adds later, laughing, “he should have used more condoms.”
Albert is reported to have once said of his tough love–dispensing father: “I’ll get married when Rainier dies.” When that happened, in 2005, Bern says that Albert, then 47, changed. “I noticed he was like another man,” he says. Albert’s speech, which Bern says had a hint of George VI’s stutter, suddenly rang with confidence.
Cleaning up Monaco’s reputation was part of the prince’s mission to put his own stamp on the state after his father’s long rule. But doing so would not be without challenges, especially for someone whose reputation required its own rehab.
Robert Eringer remembers the tension between Albert’s professional and personal lives. The American private investigator says he got to know the prince in the 1990s and remembers him as a “shy and awkward” man.
In 2005, when Albert took the throne, Eringer established an unofficial agency—the Monaco Intelligence Service—to help root out unsavory characters who did not fit the new image. Late that same year, Eringer says he met Tamara Rotolo and Jazmin in Monaco, months before Jazmin was officially recognized. “I had hoped for Albert to meet his daughter for the first time in a private setting, our safe house,” Eringer writes in an email to me from his home in Santa Barbara. “It would have meant a lot to her and mitigated the harshness of legal proceedings.” But Albert and his lawyers passed up the opportunity, Eringer claims, waiting instead for Jazmin’s legal recognition the following year.
Eringer says he lost royal favor in 2007 and later attempted to sue the prince for unpaid fees of $60,000. His case collapsed when a U.S. court ruled that sovereign immunity applied to the disputed contract. Eringer also wrote a blog that carried dozens of scandalous claims about the prince and his rule, including a striking photo of Albert leaping naked from a boat in his more carefree days.
Albert and his lawyers have dismissed Eringer’s claims and sued the American for defamation, compelling him to take down his blog, according to Eringer. Albert once described his former consigliere as “a bitter person who spews his venom and resentments on the internet.” Thierry Lacoste, Albert’s lawyer, tells me Eringer’s “slanderous attacks” are “a demonstration of his absence of probity.”
Yet in the latest paternity scandal, Eringer emerges as an unlikely character witness for Albert, albeit a barbed one. His doubts about Mariza’s story center on her claim that Albert had disguised his identity. “That was not how Albert operated,” Eringer tells me. “He used his identity as a prince to attract women. By 2005 Albert was nearing 50, almost bald, fat, and rather ugly. It was his princely status that attracted women, certainly not his looks.”
Bern is more diplomatic—and guarded—in doubting the latest claims. “If there are already illegitimate children, it’s easy to say, ‘I’m also one,’ ” he says. “But I won’t judge, because if tomorrow it’s proven, I would look very stupid.”
In the meantime, Albert has been anxious to present a wholesome image of his legitimate family, even as they remain physically separated. This summer, while nursing her sinuses in South Africa, Charlene released a series of heavily produced videos charting their relationship to mark the 10th anniversary of their marriage. “Happy anniversary, Albert, thank you for the blessing of our beautiful children,” the princess wrote under a trailer published on her official Instagram page. And yet, for all the public sentiment, the couple did not celebrate together—doctor’s orders.
Albert, meanwhile, is doing his own PR tour. In an interview earlier this year, he talked about his children, who turn seven in December. Crown Prince -Jacques is “shy and a little quieter,” while Princess Gabriella is “a little more outgoing and definitely has the gift of gab.” He has also talked about the pandemic, which has been an economic disaster for the principality, though his words could easily have been an appraisal of the ever diminishing odds, in the wake of his personal drama, of his accomplishing what he set out to do for Monaco when he ascended the throne nearly two decades ago. “When we don’t know what the future holds,” he said, “both in the short and long term…it’s a bit worrying and very unsettling.”
This story appears in the November 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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