Judge forces retired Belgian king to take a paternity test
BRUSSELS — To the long list of concessions that European monarchs have made to modernity, Belgium is adding another: submitting to a paternity test.
After refusing for months, King Albert II will soon give a DNA sample, his lawyer said this week, in a lawsuit brought by a woman who says she is his daughter, neglected and kept secret for decades.
But King Albert, who abdicated the Belgian throne in 2013, will still fight to conceal the result.
The paternity test could mark a dramatic turn in a lawsuit that has been underway for years, exposing Belgium’s secretive royal family to unusual public scrutiny and criticism.
There is more at stake than just recognition. The case could also make the plaintiff, Delphine Boël, 51, an heiress to the king’s fortune, which is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
A court ordered the DNA test six months ago, but King Albert refused to obey, and last week a Brussels judge threatened to fine the king 5,000 euros (almost $5,600) a day until he submitted.
“His Majesty the King will accept the blood test, now that he is compelled to do so,” Guy Hiernaux, a lawyer for King Albert, said Monday. But he would do so “on the condition that the results are kept secret until Belgium’s highest court rules on the appeal against the order,” Hiernaux said, which could “easily” take several more years.
King Albert ceded the throne to his eldest son, King Philippe, almost six years ago. Soon after that, Boël, an artist, filed her lawsuit.
She claims to be the child of an extramarital affair between her aristocratic mother, Baroness Sybille de Selys Longchamps, and the future King Albert, who was then a prince, married to Paola Ruffo di Calabria, an Italian princess with whom he had three children.
When Boël was born in 1968, the prince privately recognized her as his daughter and cared for her, according to her lawyer.
But things got more complicated in 1993 when his older brother, King Baudouin, died suddenly of heart failure at age 63, leaving no children, and Albert became king. An out-of-wedlock child would have been an embarrassing distraction for a playboy prince.
King Albert phoned Boël and told her “now we cut all ties,” said Patrick Weber, a Belgian art historian and royalty watcher who has written several books on the monarchy and knows Boël.
Boël’s story has made her a popular and sympathetic figure as well. Three out of four Belgians support her lawsuit, according to a poll in March by Belgium’s largest Francophone newspaper, Le Soir.