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Belgian artist fights to be accepted by royal family
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A BELGIAN artist who says she is the daughter of Belgium’s former king asked a court yesterday to establish the identity of her biological father, a ruling that could put her 15th in line to the throne.
Delphine Boel, 46, has fought for more than a decade to gain the royal family’s acceptance and end what she says is prejudice against her because of the question over her paternity.
Boel’s lawyer, Alain De Jonge, told Belgian newspaper De Morgen that Boel was not motivated by money, saying that financially she would be better off as a Boel, a Belgian industrial family worth about US$1 billion.
“If the royal family got in a plane together and had an accident or, as in Nepal, were killed by a mad man, then she could be queen. But her ambitions do not stretch that far. It is more about the ending of a stigma,” De Jonge said. “She is hoping no longer to be branded as the illegitimate daughter, but wishes to be recognized as a child.”
Boel and her lawyer arrived at a civil court in Brussels yesterday morning without commenting. An attorney for the former king said little, beyond that he was optimistic. The hearing was conducted behind closed doors, as is usual in family law suits.
De Jonge has said that the court would initially examine whether her legal father, Jacques Boel, is a biological parent and that a recently conducted paternity test showed he was not.
Media have reported that Boel has disinherited his daughter because of the shame the scandal had brought to his family.
Under Belgian law a man cannot be forced to take a paternity test, but a judge could take his refusal to do so into account.
Boel’s case came to light in 1999 with the publication of a biography of Queen Paolo, Albert’s Italian wife. It said Albert had formed an extra-marital relationship resulting in the birth of a daughter in the 1960s, when his brother Baudouin was king.
He has never commented on the possible existence of such a daughter but did refer in his 1999 Christmas message to a crisis in his marriage 30 years earlier, the time of Boel’s birth.
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