In the space of a year, a playboy prince and committed bachelor had risen to the throne and admitted to having two illegitimate children. Now 29, Jazmin Grace Grimaldi (who did not reply to emails for this story) is an actress and singer. Her daughter, then 14, was having a normal day at her school near Palm Springs when Albert’s lawyers announced that she had been formally recognized as a member of a billionaire royal family halfway around the world. Rotolo’s attempts to seek child support through the courts had come to naught. In 2006 a DNA test confirmed the claims of a former waitress from California, Tamara Rotolo, who had for years insisted that her daughter Jazmin was the result of a brief encounter with Prince Albert in 1991, while she was on holiday in France. (Albert has two sisters, one of whom, Stéphanie, has had relationships, marriages, and three children with, variously, two bodyguards, an elephant trainer, and a Portuguese circus acrobat.) Monaco’s constitution excludes children born out of wedlock. But not the line of succession, which Rainier had cannily changed by constitutional amendment in 2002 to include siblings as heirs if they had children. In 2005 Albert accepted the boy, now 18, as part of his family-and fortune. The prince had asked for her phone number during an Air France flight from Nice to Paris. Alexandre was born in late 2002, the product of a relationship that began in 1997 with Nicole Coste (née Tossoukpé), a flight attendant from Togo in West Africa. Across 10 pages, the gossipy French magazine (and bible of Monégasque intrigue) revealed that the bachelor prince had a secret love child. In 2005, weeks after Prince Albert completed his accession at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a cover story in Paris Match stunned France. And the latest allegations are yet another threat to his moral, modernizing mission. Yet for all his efforts, Albert, whose wife initially brought a more modern brand of glamour to his rule, seems unable to get out of his own way. Albert knows this, and he has long sought to keep the stardust falling he oversaw the design of a $50,000-a-night Princess Grace Suite at Monaco’s storied Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, which reopened after refurbishment in 2019.
And the latest scandal, which involves yet another paternity claim, hangs darkly over Albert’s principality.Īlmost four decades after her death in a car crash, Grace Kelly still lends Monaco a degree of status in the popular imagination that dwarfs its geopolitical importance. No sooner had he ascended to the throne than decades of his own fast living came back to bite him in the royal derriere. His government in the glitzy tax haven, which is smaller than Central Park and has a population under 40,000, would be guided by “morality, honesty, and ethics.”īut the billionaire bachelor had perhaps not applied the same propriety to his personal life. “I will fight with all my strength for Monaco to be beyond reproach,” Albert said in his accession speech. “ Pas plus!” cried Albert, the half-American son of Prince Rainier III, who led Monaco’s Grimaldi dynasty for more than half a century, and Grace Kelly, who sprinkled stardust over what had long been a constitutional relic. Somerset Maugham, the British writer and resident of nearby Nice, once described the French Riviera, which includes the 700-year-old casino state, as a “sunny place for shady people.” For decades the tiny principality-a gaudy jewel on the French republic’s south coast-had become synonymous with grift, gambling, and questionable banking practices. When Albert II succeeded his father as the Sovereign Prince of Monaco in 2005, he made a bold pledge. But now, 15 years after he ascended the throne and several scandals later, there is a new one, perhaps the most outrageous of all-a story that involves an anonymous Brazilian, dueling lawyers in Milan and Paris, a Vladimir Putin cameo, and the worst sinus infection in the history of mankind. His marriage seemed a turning point, an opportunity to right the ship not just of his own life but of his homeland.
Before his marriage in 2011 to the South African swimmer Charlene Wittstock, Albert, the playboy prince of Monaco, upheld the traditions of a dysfunctional family that has been defined by scandal and intrigue for seven centuries.