A few days before January 12, 1980, the date on which Bárbara Rey married Ángel Cristo in Valencia, the artist received at her residence in Madrid a package containing It contained two gifts: an ostentatious watch for her future husband and a solitaire that the star recognized as soon as she saw it. As soon as she discovered the box containing this diamond, she did not need to know the sender: she knew that the package had been sent to her by King Juan Carlos.
The story of this ring is a reflection of the type of relationship that Bárbara Rey had with him. father of Philip VI in the three years before her marriage to the trainer and circus performer. Based on sporadic encounters, she asked favors from the then king from the start. One of these first requests concerns precisely this lonely man: at a time when she was going through financial difficulties, she asked for money from Juan Carlos I, who left her a million pesetas in exchange for keeping her ring as collateral. When she gave him the money back, he would give her the ring back. But time passed and the artist did not return with that million pesetas. When she became engaged to Ángel Cristo, a few days before the wedding, Juan Carlos I returned this diamond to her as a wedding gift, which the Zarzuela Palace had ordered to be valued and which was valued at 10 million pesetas .
The story that Bárbara Rey told about this loner is very different. In the documentary “A Barbara Life”, the artist explains that she bought this ring from a person who lost a fortune at bingo. “I already had a lot of trust with the King and I told him that I needed 4 million [de pesetas] for my family. I suggested he buy it for me. The stone was worth about $12. He accepted. Two days later, a person came with the money and the first thing he did was ask me for the diamond.” He discovered soon after that Juan Carlos I was bragging about having gotten a good deal. According to It “hurt her a lot” and he ended up disappointing her, to the point that she became “more and more distant.” As ABC learned, the story was quite the opposite for him. understand, the first thing to do is to situate the two stages during which the sporadic encounters between Juan Carlos I and Barbara Rey. It is important to emphasize how sporadic they were, because what happened between them could never be considered a romance, as happened with other close friends of Don Juan Carlos.
The king and the artist They met in 1977. According to her, he called her home several times and she was never there, until one day it happened to him that she was at home and they had their first telephone conversation, which led many others to their first formal meeting, which was at the Zarzuela Palace.
Bárbara Rey and Juan Carlos I continued to see each other once or twice a month, until she married Ángel Cristo in 1980. Although, according to the artist, they remained in contact as friends for the entire duration of their marriage. She claims that he was interested in her during her two pregnancies and in the condition of her children, Sofía and Ángel Cristo junior.
In 1990, two years after her divorce from the coach, the artist contacted Don Juan Carlos and they met again in successive meetings until the beginning of 1994. In this second stage of the relationship, the star’s house in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid) becomes the scene of their meetings. A house that has gone around the world in recent weeks, after the publication in a Dutch magazine of a series of photographs in which the two appear on the terrace. The images were taken in 1994 by Ángel Cristo Jr. and were used to blackmail the then head of state. In exchange for not appearing in these photographs, the king’s administrator paid the star at least 25 million pesetas in 1994 and arranged for her to be hired at TVE.
With driver and guides
At the time when the meetings between Don Juan Carlos and Bárbara Rey took place, both tried to go unnoticed. The house of Boadilla del Monte was a sort of refuge for them, where the artist prepared paellas and migas for the king, which she always accompanied with good wines that she bought only when he went to see her at her home. When Don Juan Carlos went there, he did so with Gaudencio, the driver of his car, and a few bodyguards who waited for him in the parking lot of Bárbara Rey’s house for as long as necessary. To put them at ease while they waited, she brought them plates of the same food she had prepared for the king.
In this second stage of the relationship, she saw that he was distancing himself more and more from his meetings. Barbara Rey She always maintained that the story ended because there was already another woman in Don Juan Carlos’ life, but the truth is that he began to visit her house less when he was told from the Zarzuela Palace that a first blackmail had arrived from an anonymous person who, after several investigations, discovered that it was the artist herself. In the meantime, she took advantage of the few visits he continued to make to record the conversations they had had, in which she tried to obtain information from him, like the one that has become known these days. The audio and video recordings were the material that Bárbara Rey used, already in 1997, to carry out a second blackmail, as proven in the book “The Spy Chief” and later confirmed by the former director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) Alberto Saiz. The deal was worth 600 million pesetas.
“I really liked it. The fact is we agreed from the start, he had his life, I had mine. “We knew there couldn’t be anything else.” Until Bárbara Rey made these statements in January 2023 to the magazine ‘Vanity Fair’, on the occasion of the promotion of the series ‘Cristo y Rey’ (produced by Atresplayer and visible on Netflix), she had never talked about his story. with Juan Carlos I. Emotion was guaranteed, although this romance was known throughout Spain practically from its beginnings. Even if, more than a romance, it was still an adventure. A whim that ended with the blackmail of a millionaire.
