MADRID, 7 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
King Juan Carlos I returned from his trips with “bags full of cash” that “friends” had given him at the time he had a relationship with Corinna Larsen, according to the businesswoman in the second chapter of the podcast ‘Corinna y el King’.
“I saw him return from trips and he was happy as a 5-year-old child, he brought bags full of cash,” said Corinna, who assures that she asked him what that was. Don Juan Carlos replied “this belongs to my friend such and such”. “It seemed like a very common situation,” underlines what was the monarch’s sentimental partner.
“If I asked him any questions, he would answer, ‘Oh, you’re so dramatic, you don’t understand how Spain works,'” she adds in her testimony, assuring that she did not understand that and in fact framed it in what she considered the “court of miracles” that surrounded the then King.
In this sense, he gives as an example that if he told someone that he was interested in a wine, 20 boxes of it arrived within a few days. “His desire for him was an order for others and people worked their asses off just to please him,” he stresses.
Under the title ‘Living the story. Death, democracy and bags of money’, the second chapter reviews some of the most outstanding events in the life of Don Juan Carlos, such as his arrival in Spain, the years he was under Franco’s supervision, his rise to the throne and his role in the 1981 coup.
Corinna talks about some of these events, in particular when Don Juan Carlos agreed to be Franco’s heir, derailing her father Don Juan’s aspirations to ever occupy the throne. “I don’t think the father saw it coming,” she says, saying he was “pretty ruthless.”
Likewise, he comments on another of the hardest moments in the life of the former monarch, a “grey area”, the death of his younger brother Alfonso in 1956, in circumstances that were never investigated, from a shot at the family residence in Estoril. The official version was that it was an accident while he was cleaning the gun.
However, Corinna assures that Don Juan Carlos came to recognize him in 2006 that it was he who pulled the trigger. “They were playing a stupid game but he loaded the gun anyway,” she says, after the thesis is told in the podcast that the two brothers were playing at shooting each other. Although it was never investigated, “deep in his soul and in his head he feels great guilt,” she stresses.
“Her father’s first reaction was to ask him ‘promise me you didn’t do it on purpose’. I can imagine how he must have felt because that meant the father thought he had deliberately shot his brother,” recalls Corinna, explaining that Don Juan Carlos “said that his younger brother was the really brilliant one, the handsome one” and the “favorite son of his parents”.
The ‘Corinna y el Rey’ podcast officially launched this Monday, with the open publication of the first two chapters on different platforms. It has been made by Project Brazen, co-founded by Pulitzer Prize finalists Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, with the collaboration of the non-profit organization PRX and the production companies Audiation from New York and La Coctelera Music from Spain.
After the first of the chapters was released last week, the producers met the criticism and doubts raised by the alleged intentionality of its publication at this time, denying that the aristocrat had anything to do with it.
The podcast, they defended in a statement, “is an independent production carried out by Project Brazen and PRX” and there is “no contractual relationship” with Corinna “nor has any economic consideration been made towards her person.”
As for the fact that it has become known on the eve of a new hearing at the London Court of Appeal in which the defense of the former monarch will present their arguments against the civil lawsuit filed by Corinna against him for the harassment of the assures that he was a victim, the producers defend that “the launch date of the podcast has been selected so that its broadcast is completed before Christmas”, since there are eight chapters.
“At no time has it had any relationship with other aspects beyond the control of the producers or promoted by third parties,” they stressed.
