The former mistress of Juan Carlos has claimed that Spain’s former king presided over a “court of miracles” in which he would be “happy as a five-year-old” receiving “bags full of cash”.
In the second instalment of a new podcast, Corinna Larsen, 57, who is known by her married name, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, discusses the allegations of corruption that revolved around Juan Carlos’s reign before he abdicated in 2014 and fled to Abu Dhabi amid financial scandal.
In Corinna and the King, produced by the bestselling authors Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, Larsen portrays herself as a woman abused by a powerful man and expresses the feeling that she was never just a mistress but a wife, even after discovering that he had multiple lovers.
“There were things to me that were so unusual,” she explains in the episode released today. “He would call someone up who had a great château of Bordeaux wines and say, ‘I really love these wines, and could you send me some?’ And the next thing you’d know, 20 cases of this priceless wine would arrive.”
“His wish was everyone’s command, and people were literally falling over backwards just to please him,” she adds. “I’d see him come back from trips and he’d be happy as a five-year-old. And there’d be bags full of cash, and you go, ‘Oh my God, what’s that, and it’s like, oh this is from my friend so and so, and this is from my friend so and so.’ It seemed to me like a very habitual situation.”