By Rob Harris
Copenhagen: Mary, now Queen of Denmark, turned heads back in October when she visited New York, giving the tabloids fodder with her eye-catching floral dress and making headlines in the more highbrow press with a speech marking United Nations Day.
On official royal duties, she addressed a reception at a UN Mission event highlighting her country’s role in raising awareness of the consequences of climate change, including the impact of sea level rise on low-lying communities.
Denmark’s King Frederik X and Queen Mary and members of the royal family arrive at Folketing, the Danish parliament.Credit: AP
It was serious business from someone that the Danish have come to know, love and regard as a serious person. A few weeks they would later learn that at the same time their future queen was wooing diplomats, their future king was in Madrid dining and staying at the apartment of a Mexican reality TV show star.
It took a Spanish magazine, Lecturas, to produce the scoop that the royal father of four, along with socialite Genoveva Casanova, visited a Pablo Picasso exhibition, walked through El Retiro Park and later went out for dinner. Lecturas claimed the pair went to her apartment building separately at around 7pm and both re-emerged two hours later, both having changed their clothes into evening wear.
They then watched a flamenco performance at a Spanish restaurant, El Corral de la Moreria, which finished after midnight, leaving the restaurant together before the now King Frederik was seen leaving her apartment at 8:30am the next day.
Spain, with a markedly different media tradition from Denmark, boasts several gossip magazines and almost every TV channel has its own sensational magazine-style gossip program. They have hounded their own scandal-plagued royals for years.
The magazine, without sources and seemingly relying on the pictures alone, insinuated there was a romantic relationship. Numerous international media outlets followed the story.
The publication of the photos led Casanova, 47, to issue a statement denying any kind of romantic relationship between herself and the future king and slamming the “malicious” rumours suggesting the pair were romantically involved.
The Danish royal house had almost nothing to say: “We do not comment on rumours and insinuations”.
The story became too big for the Danish press to ignore. Some jumped into it, others saw it as crossing a line.
A rough ride for the new king and queen
With Queen Margrethe II’s abdication on New Year’s Eve, the story went to the next level.
Has she, as longtime author and royal commentator Phil Dampier speculated, stood down to save her son’s marriage and the royal family? In Denmark, at least, the media gave this theory very little credence. “Most of the media contribute to a benevolent culture filled with patting the royal family,” Knud Brix, the editor-in-chief of Denmark’s proudly republican tabloid Ekstra Bladet, says. “Because, of course, it’s interesting that the heir to the throne is walking around without bodyguards in Madrid with a small rolling suitcase and apparently spending the night with a woman who is not his wife.
“It’s a story in the Spanish media, and it should have been a story in all Danish media.”
Danish King Frederik X and Queen Mary kiss on the balcony of Christiansborg Palace.Credit: Getty
The abdication of a queen who sat on the throne for more than half a century is poised to modernise the Danish monarch in very many ways.
Having become head of state in an era of black-and-white television, high-circulation printed newspapers and rotary dial telephones, she appeared to live in that age since, happily secluded and shielded from the communication revolution of the 21st century. In 2021, Margrethe II admitted she hadn’t tried being on Facebook, texting or even emailing. It is unlikely she has since.
As she hands the baton to her son, Frederik X, and his wife, Queen Mary, to renew and regenerate the crown, the royal family – like others throughout Europe – is bracing for a somewhat rough ride.
The mainstream Danish press, with a few exceptions, has traditionally respected the privacy of both the royal family and its politicians, as long as there are no signs that the private affects the political.
One of the family’s greatest challenges is dealing with a media landscape that will create a significantly more difficult situation, says historian and royal family expert Lars Hovbakke Sørensen.
He says while the Danish press today is getting closer to the royals, any smartphone can catch that cheeky pint or misstep that used to exist only as a rumour.
“Paradoxically, it is also Queen Margrethe’s great success that has made the media today very interested in the royal family,” Sørensen said last week.
Editor-in-chief of Politiken Amalie Kestler said the broadsheet’s decision not to cover the fall-out from the photos and allegations of an affair was not necessarily a decision of principle.
Queen Mary chats with her son, Crown Prince Christian, as Princess Benedikte looks on, during a celebration of Frederik’s accession to the throne.Credit: Getty
“We are interested in the royal family if there are major events,” she says. “But the Crown Prince’s overnight stays with someone are not first on our agenda. It’s not relevant according to our news criteria. But it is clear that should there be a situation where it has consequences, we will be interested in it.”
‘Once is forgivable, twice is a bad habit’
Frederik has not necessarily always been treated with kid gloves in the media, having been criticised for several misjudgements including flying in the private jet of Lego billionaire Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, ignoring police warnings and crossing the country’s longest suspension bridge during a storm, and his controversial stint as an International Olympic Committee delegate where he was accused of siding with Russia over doping allegations.
Historian Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, from the University of Copenhagen, said he found it “absolutely astonishing” that, after all those issues, Frederik would put himself in a situation where pictures were taken of him in Madrid.
But his intuition about the Danes’ reaction to the scandal was that once was forgivable, but twice “is a bad habit”.
“If he does not do such a thing a second time, it will be forgotten. But if it happens again, he will have a serious problem,” Olden-Jorgensen said.
Berlingske, known as Copenhagen’s newspaper of record, has offered several pieces about the issue, acknowledging that while it does not know what happened in Madrid, the king had put himself and his family in a bind.
Pierre Collignon, who is debate editor at the paper, says while the affair may well be a reality, the truth might never be known.
“If he does not do such a thing a second time, it will be forgotten. But if it happens again, he will have a serious problem.”
Historian Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, from the University of Copenhagen.
“When the story is out in the international media, it would seem artificial for the Danish press to shut it up, but I feel no need to moralise about Frederik’s behaviour,” says Collignon.
“In the absence of facts, I would encourage people to turn down the speculation and instead think about the contract between the population and the regent,” he says. “After all, we demand quite a lot from our future regent and his family.”
He says the Danes expected to be able to follow weddings, births and birthdays as if the royal family were part of their own.
“The result is a constant pressure to look in, and when there are crises or divorces in the family, the public also follows,” he says. “We just have to ask ourselves how strict the requirements for insight into private life will be. If we never give the royal family peace, it will not be bearable for the regent and his close ones.”
Long-time royal reporter Trine Villemann, whose 2008 unauthorised biography of Frederik, entitled 1015 Copenhagen K, caused a major stir, says there is little doubt the new king and his family will not be afforded the same restraint from the media as those who came before them.
She said technology and social media had meant privacy was rapidly “going out the door” for royals and commoners, and it would need to be factored in by the young royal family, with four teenage children.
“We have this sort of unspoken rule in Danish media that we do not touch the children. No matter what kind of things they’ve been up to, we leave them alone until the age of 18,” she said.
“But now social media has changed the whole dynamics of that, there have been various videos of [the couple’s oldest child] Prince Christian already, you know, popping champagne bottles on expensive ski trips, in the Alps. That’s not going to get any better.
She said royal families are now just one scandal away from a full-blown crisis, from Britain’s Prince Andrew and his links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, to the abdications of monarchs in Belgium and Spain amid claims of fathering a love child, or posing with an elephant killed while hunting on safari.
“I think the game has changed so much over the past five or 10 years,” she says.
Villemann says what happened with Frederik in Madrid is “between him and his wife”, but added that it was an example of terrible judgment.
“The wife was away doing some UN thing in New York and he was seen walking through Madrid, you know, with an attractive blonde lady. He’s been through a lot of scandals, and we always end up forgiving him. But he should know better by now.”
But Collignon says even if the accusation of infidelity were true, it is not certain that it is up to the media to judge Frederik’s actions.
“If a future Danish king has a child out of wedlock, there is a clear and even legal interest, as it may cast doubt on the line of succession,” he says. “But a simple affair between two consenting, mature people?
Knud Brix, who issued a formal invite to Casanova to attend last weekend’s ceremony on social media, says his outlet would continue to scrutinise the royal household, be it on spending or allegations of infidelity.
And he’d like the Danish media to ask the new king just one question: “What were you doing in Madrid?”
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