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Royal Life as “Shakespearean Tragedy”: Documentation
The then Spanish King Juan Carlos and his then close friend Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in a scene from the series “Juan Carlos – Love, Money, Betrayal”. photo
© Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein/Beetz brothers film production/Sky/dpa
If you fly very high, you can also fall very low. The four-part Sky docuseries “Juan Carlos – Love, Money, Betrayal” tells the story of the rise and fall of the former monarch and folk hero Juan Carlos.
Not very many lives were and are as steeped in history and scandal as that of the Spanish king Juan Carlos. The four-part documentary series about the 85-year-old Bourbons, which starts on Sunday on Sky Documentaries with the first two episodes, is correspondingly captivating and explosive.
“Juan Carlos – Love, Money, Betrayal” is a mixture of political thriller, business thriller and TV soap opera with lots of gossip. Or as one of the numerous interviewees, the former royal correspondent for the newspaper “El Mundo”, Ana Romero, puts it: “It has the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy: power, suffering, money, sex.”
“When we started to produce the investigative series (…), we weren’t aware of the extent of the political dimensions,” says multiple Grimme award winner Christian Beetz, who works as a producer and author. “Step by step, a network of intrigues, greed and power games unfolded, which reaches into the highest circles of society and is protected by the Spanish secret service CNI to this day.”
In Spain he was considered a folk hero
Juan Carlos was King and Head of State of Spain for almost four decades. Back home, he was long considered a folk hero and the “savior of democracy” after he persuaded a putschist group to give up with a resolute speech in February 1981.
Rumors of infidelities hardly damaged his image. It was corruption scandals and above all an ominous elephant hunt in Africa that led to his deep fall, which could not be stopped by his abdication in June 2014 in favor of his son Felipe.
The documentary shows real scenes, for which the producers dug deep into the archive, but also numerous recreated ones. In addition to Madrid, the locations include Monaco, Geneva, New York and Abu Dhabi, where Juan Carlos has been living in exile since summer 2020. In the approximately 45-minute episodes, investigative journalists, royal house experts, a former secret service employee and friends and confidants of “Rey Emérito”, the “emeritus king”, have their say.
Harassment lawsuit against Juan Carlos
The “leading actress” of the production is undoubtedly Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein – a native of Frankfurt who was a very close friend of Juan Carlos for many years. The 59-year-old woman once again doesn’t mince words and picks apart the ex-monarch (and also the Spanish secret service) using every trick in the book.
The London High Court has not yet ruled on her harassment lawsuit against Juan Carlos. Sky emphasizes that the old king and Felipe VI. were asked to comment and did not comment. The former secret service chief Félix Sanz Roldán mentioned in the documentary was not reached.