Written from self-imposed exile in the United Arab Emirates, former King Juan Carlos I’s new memoir reads less like a royal reflection and more like a dispatch from a man haunted by a past he refuses to confront. The book arrives as he continues to live thousands of miles from Spain, a distance created not by choice alone, but by scandal, legal scrutiny, and allegations that have threatened to engulf his legacy.
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| Haunted by assassination of his brother? |
Juan Carlos fled to the UAE in 2020 after a series of financial controversies and investigations by Spanish prosecutors into alleged irregularities involving offshore accounts and opaque gifts. While several inquiries were later archived, the damage to his public standing was irreversible. The former king writes nothing about this chapter of his life beyond vague references to “difficult circumstances,” leaving readers staring directly at the hole where accountability might have been.
The memoir also omits mention of another cloud: media reports and anonymous sources who have claimed that his name appears among those connected to Jeffrey Epstein. Still, the omission feels pointed. In a memoir already defined by its silences, this is one of the loudest.
Instead, Juan Carlos devotes his pages to earlier ghosts. He describes the death of his younger brother Alfonso as “a tragic accident,” refusing once more to address the persistent conspiracy theories that the shooting was intentional; or at least suspiciously convenient, given that Franco had allegedly favored Alfonso, not Juan Carlos, as Spain’s future king.
Historians note that the memoir’s evasions feel almost deliberate. Some scholars argue that Franco’s influence over Juan Carlos did not end with the dictator’s death. They claim, metaphorically, that Franco still “controls him from the grave,” the weight of Alfonso’s death pressing on the former king like a political curse inherited, not earned.
In UAE exile, these ghosts seem to follow him more closely than his defenders. The memoir, released with no press tour and no public appearances, is imbued with the tone of a man writing from a fortified room: reflective, defensive, and surrounded by shadows he will not name.
What emerges is not a confession, nor an attempt at redemption. It is a chronicle curated by omission, a portrait of a monarch who once stood at the center of Spain’s democratic transition but now exists only at its periphery... alone, embattled, and pursued by the past he insists on refusing to explain.
Spain is left to read between the lines. And in those margins, the darkness is deeper than ever.
