Nude photos lay bare royal rivalry
The King of Thailand’s mistress has become the object of an international campaign to humiliate her with sexually explicit photographs, apparently in connection to her intense rivalry with his wife and queen.
More than 1000 photographs of Maha Vajiralongkorn’s official ‘‘consort’’, Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, many of them nude, have been sent to antimonarchy activists outside the country.
The anonymous leaks have coincided with Sineenat’s return to royal favour after she was dramatically purged and imprisoned last year.
The photographs were sent to Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a British journalist, who writes critically about the Thai establishment, and to Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai academic who lives in Japan and who faces criminal prosecution in Thailand for his criticism of the monarchy.
Data describing the 1443 images shows that they were taken between 2012 and 2014 apparently by Sineenat herself. ‘‘Most of the images are photographs she took of herself, and dozens of them are very explicit,’’ Marshall wrote on his Facebook page. Sineenat is best known by her nickname, Koi. ‘‘It seems probable that she had taken these explicit photographs of herself to send to Vajiralongkorn . . . [and that] the images of Koi were leaked in an effort to sabotage her return as Vajiralongkorn’s consort.’’ The king, who is 68, named Sineenat, 35, his ‘‘royal noble consort’’ in August last year. It was the first time in the modern history of Thailand that a king acknowledged having an extramarital partner and was official recognition of longstanding rumours about his womanising.
The elevation of the former nurse came barely three months after the king’s marriage to Suthida, a 41-yearold
former stewardess on Thai Airlines. It was the first time that a Thai king had effectively practised polygamy since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932.
Last October, an official statement suddenly accused his mistress of being ‘‘dishonourable, lacking gratitude [and of] disobedience against the king and the queen’’. Then in August this year the reported that not only was she back, but she had never done anything wrong.
The reversals have added to the king’s image as a capricious and impulsive philanderer, with a history of harsh treatment of his three previous wives and their children. Since succeeding his father in 2016, the king, who is said to have a personal fortune of
NZ$85 billion, has spent most of his time living in a luxury hotel in southern Germany where he was regularly photographed by tabloids wearing belly-exposing crop tops and elaborate henna tattoos.