Reported today on The New York Times For the full article visit:
Ex-King of Belgium Acknowledges a Long-Dismissed DaughterAfter a court-ordered DNA test, the 85-year-old King Albert II, who abdicated in 2013, conceded that he was the biological father of the artist Delphine Boël, 51.King Albert II, the former Belgian monarch, conceded this week that DNA tests showed he was the biological father of Delphine Boël, an artist who claimed to be his daughter from an extramarital affair, an extraordinary admission after years of lawsuits that exposed the royal family to unusual levels of scrutiny.King Albert's lawyers said in a statement on Monday that the 85-year-old former monarch, who initially refused to comply with court-ordered DNA tests before finally submitting last year, had "taken note" of the results.The lawyers added that there were "legal arguments and objections" establishing that "a legal paternity is not necessarily the reflection of a biological paternity," but that the king had decided "not to raise them and to put an end to this difficult procedure, in honor and dignity."Alain Berenboom, one of the king's lawyers, said on Tuesday that the Court of Appeal in Brussels would hear the case for a final time in June and that the legal proceedings would come to a close shortly afterward.Ms. Boël, 51, is a Belgian visual artist who has claimed for years that she was conceived during an affair in the 1960s between her mother, Baroness Sybille de Selys Longchamps, and Albert, who was then a prince and married to Paola Ruffo di Calabria, an Italian princess. Prince Albert and his wife already had three children.Rumors of an illegitimate child were first alluded to in a 1999 book about Queen Paola by a journalist, Mario Danneels, and Ms. Boël made her first public claim that King Albert was her father in a 2005 interview.While King A
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