It is August 5, 1996. Daniel Ducruet, then husband of Stéphanie of Monaco, arrives at a luxurious villa in Cap de Villefranche, just five kilometers from Nice and 15 from Monte Carlo. There he is awaited by a Belgian stripper, Fili Houteman, whom he met a few days earlier at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium. What happens next is history of glossy paper and European royalty, a scandal that now marks 30 years. The princess’s husband was not only unfaithful, but his betrayal was captured in a pornographic scene filmed by a photographer who was attentively waiting for it to happen. He was unaware that this infidelity was being recorded, but the world found out a few weeks later. At the end of August, the Italian magazines Eva Tremila and Gente published those images; in Spain, Interviú was the one who shared them. The controversy was served and the divorce was already brewing in Monaco.
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Let’s go back a few years. Ducruet arrived in Monaco in 1986 to work as a police officer. Shortly after, he became one of the security team for Prince Albert, Stéphanie’s older brother. It was precisely the heir who recommended Ducruet as head of security for his sister. The relationship, which they tried to keep secret, was discovered in the early nineties by the magazine Paris Match, which published images of them on the Portuguese coast. Rainier of Monaco was firmly opposed to this relationship from the start, but after two children together — Louis, in 1992; Pauline, in 1994 — he had no choice but to approve the marriage. Their relationship was sealed on July 1, 1995; a year later, the scandal broke. The love story that began by grabbing headlines for being controversial ended up being much more so.
During the year their marriage lasted, Ducruet used his influence as part of the Monegasque royal family to establish real estate companies, restaurants, and other businesses, without neglecting motorsport. It was precisely this passion for racing that alerted the photographers. It was the middle of July and Stéphanie of Monaco’s husband was enjoying the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps. During the training days, he was seen friendlier than usual with one of the paddock hostesses: it was Houteman. But what caught the photographers’ attention was that the day Stéphanie of Monaco went to see him compete, she was nowhere to be found.
The paparazzi of the time had long been after the most sought-after photos: those of Ducruet, labeled by tabloids as a womanizer, cheating on Grace Kelly’s daughter. There were rumors, but no published proof had confirmed those suspicions. Those snapshots could be worth thousands and thousands of euros, and getting them became a treasure hunt for many. Photographer Stéphane de Lisiecki was that day in the Belgian paddock and took some images of that closeness. He offered them to several magazines, but they were rejected because “they didn’t suggest anything.” He did not give up.
Different versions have been told about what happened next. Many said it was Rainier of Monaco himself, who still did not approve of the relationship, who hatched the plan to discredit Ducruet and thus break up his marriage; others soon claimed it was the photographer who colluded with Houteman to provide those images. The protagonist continues to defend that it was a trap and that he was drugged so that it happened, and others even pointed to the Italian mafia as the intellectual authors of the plan. The only real thing is what the images of the adultery show.
On August 5, 1996, Ducruet receives a call from the Belgian dancer, who wants to invite him to a villa. He accepts and goes along with another companion. Both fell into the trap. Lisiecki only wanted a photo of a kiss, but ended up witnessing the biggest scandal of the moment. He used 11 rolls, each with 36 photos, that is, he got 396 very compromising photos that would end up starring on the covers of magazines around the world. In them, Ducruet and Houteman are seen having sex outdoors, in different positions and in different places around the villa’s pool. The ex-bodyguard did not know it, but every one of his gestures was being photographed and recorded. Yves Hoogewys, the protagonist’s partner, was also involved and was in charge of starting the video camera recording.
It was impossible to justify that; the images did not suggest, they were explicit and even pornographic. Ducruet thought that infidelity would be just another secret, but days later he received a call that unleashed the earthquake: the 396 images of the adultery were circulating in the editorial offices of the main magazines in Europe. He managed to stop their publication in France thanks to an accelerated legal procedure, but the same did not happen in Italy or Spain, where they saw the light despite his failed attempts to recover the rolls and pay a significant sum of money for them. “I offered a lot of money to the newspaper,” he said in 1997.
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Millions of magazines were sold, the scandal went global, and Stéphanie of Monaco was betrayed. The magazine Interviú even distributed the video with the recorded images called The Monaco Scandal. In October of that year, just over a month after publication, Ducruet and the princess officially divorced after tough negotiations. She disappeared from public life and locked herself at home; he took advantage of that media buzz to profit financially. Weeks later, he gave a statement to the magazine ¡Hola!, in which he said he felt “ashamed”: “I am the one to blame. I betrayed Stéphanie and my children.”
From that pain, that remorse, and that guilt was born the book Letter to Stéphanie (1997), where Ducruet explained, according to his version, what happened that August 5. He also revealed details until then unknown and private about his relationship with Stéphanie of Monaco. “You got up, looked at me, and I could see tears rolling down your cheeks. From that day on, nothing happened between us again,” he wrote about the day his then-wife found out about the infidelity. “Forgive me, Stéphanie, if I hurt you by going into details, but it’s as if I had the need to cleanse myself of something,” he said at another point. He also exposed his theory of having been drugged: “After three drinks, I was overwhelmed by a carnal, brutal, and violent desire that I found increasingly difficult to control. It was at that moment that I had a crazy urge to possess her.” Besides the exclusives he sold, his presence on TV shows, and the sale of his book, Ducruet took the opportunity to try his luck in the music world. He was not very successful.
The ex-bodyguard of Albert of Monaco sued both Houteman and Lisiecki and Hoogewys for the trap they had set against him. In April 2000, the Nice Criminal Court sentenced the three to prison terms ranging from six months to one year. “The three convicted must jointly pay 75,000 francs as compensation for invasion of privacy, an equal amount for violation of image rights, and 50,000 francs for moral damage,” EL PAÍS explained at the time.
Last October, almost 30 years after the event, the protagonist sat again on a TV set to tell, for the umpteenth time, his version of the story. “When we got there, I found that girl in the pool with a friend of hers, they offered us wine to drink, there were substances in the wine and there was also a paparazzi ready to shoot, and the rest everyone already knows,” he recounted on the Italian program La Volta Buona. He acknowledged that with the lawsuit he did not want money, he wanted a court to give him the reason. “For me, it was important to clarify how it happened, because it was not enough to tell my story to my children, I wanted justice to do it, to say: ‘Yes, it’s true, you fell into a trap, you are not just the husband who went around and cheated on his wife, but there was a reason.’ And it is precisely the trap they set for me and that made people earn so much money with those photos that went around the world.”
For both, life went on after the scandal. Stéphanie of Monaco soon found love again and, again, it was with a bodyguard: Jean Raymond Gottlieb. This relationship was brief and never made official, but from that short romance Camille Gottlieb was born. Her pregnancy became known during the popular Rose Ball, but what was not known was who the father was. The information and rumors pointed to him, but it was not confirmed until some time later. In September 2003, she remarried with a Portuguese acrobat named Adan López Peres, but they divorced in December 2004. As for Ducruet, he remarried in 2018 to Kelly Marie Lancie, with whom he had a daughter, Linoué, in 2013. But no matter how many years pass, how much they disappear from the media spotlight, or how much they remake their lives trying to leave the past behind: the scandal and those images will always haunt Ducruet.
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