PARAMARIBO--Just two days after a biography about Princess Juliana painted her husband Prince Bernhard as a habitual womaniser, a tabloid in Suriname claims the prince also had a “side-chick” in the former colony.
“He was a true glamour boy. His reputation as a womaniser was known here in Suriname back then. Everybody knew that he had many girlfriends and I knew one of them personally,” Parbode Magazine quoted Ali Farzanalikhan-De La Fuente as saying on Thursday.
The 90-year-old resident of senior citizen’s home Huize Prinses Margriet in Paramaribo remembered that the prince visited Suriname in October 1955 together with Juliana, then the Queen of the Netherlands, and that he opened beer brewery Parbo.
Farzanalikhan-De La Fuente did not reveal the name of the Prince’s girlfriend. “I am keeping that to myself. All I can say is that she was really proud of it,” she chuckled.
Her claim comes on the heels of the release of Juliana, the biography about Princess Juliana in which Prince Bernhard is accused of sexually assaulting an underage girl. According to the 800-page book by Jolande Withuis, which was published on Tuesday, Bernhard groped and kissed a 16-year-old girl who was staying in a spare room at the Soestdijk palace at the time.
The book states that the prince groped the girl under her blouse and kissed her on the mouth. “She managed to get him out of the room and poured her heart out to a trusted staff member, who believed her, as he heard from various other sources about Bernhard’s behaviour.” The biography claims that Bernhard also assaulted a young member of Juliana’s drama club after inviting her to come see paintings in his office.
Withuis based this information on anonymous sources. She told Volkskrant daily that the people she spoke to are reliable and the Dutch Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies NIOD knows who they are. The underlying material is housed at NIOD and will become public in 25 years.
The Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst – the Dutch Government’s information service – told news website NU.nl that they will not comment on the allegations.
Prince Bernhard died on December 1, 2004, at the age of 93. Princess Juliana and the German-born prince were married for six decades. Juliana, who abdicated the throne in favour of her daughter Beatrix in 1980, had died in March 2004.
