Actress says Spain's former King Juan Carlos paid her to hand over intimate photos of their affair

The ex-lover of Spain's former King Juan Carlos has admitted, for the first time, asking for hush money in exchange for film and photographs of them having sex.

Former cabaret girl and actress Bárbara Rey says the monarch paid €150,000 (approx. $247,000) into a foreign bank account for her.

But she has denied receiving around $6 million by the Spanish secret service to buy her silence, despite widespread reports of the extraordinary sum.

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In an interview with Spanish television broadcaster Telecinco, Rey said: "Well, I wouldn't call it [blackmail]. I had the photos, I needed help – if they call me a blackmailer I don't care".

She added: "[Juan Carlos] personally gave me money because I could have lost my house if I didn't pay the mortgage and for the children's school fees. I gave him the photos, but I kept as many.

"He told me that he would give me 100 million pesetas (approx. $989,000) to pay off the house and to have a certain amount of money to set up a business, etc.

"And that's when Manolo Prado Colón de Carvajal – the King's right-hand man – put 25 million pesetas in a bank in Switzerland that I could transfer for my needs."

The broadcaster later clarified that the bank was in Luxembourg, not Switzerland.

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She denied being paid $6 million by the Spanish secret service to keep quiet about her affair with the King, which spanned 20 years and started in the 1970s.

"What I do have to make clear is that I have never in my life been given the money they are talking about, not at all. Not at all, not at all."

Rey said that during a particularly difficult time "one of the days he came to my house, after making love, so to speak, he left me 500,000 pesetas [approx. $5000] on my bedside table", adding: "He treated me like a whore".

She also said she was given a contract to present a cooking show on Valencian regional television and 50 million pesetas [approx. $500,000], which she was paid at a rate of 5 million pesetas [approx. $50,000] a month.

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"I call it a loan for services rendered, since they call me a prostitute," Rey said.

Rey's comments come just over a month after her estranged son Angel Cristo said he was just 13 years-old when his mother asked him to secretly record her having sex with Juan Carlos in 1994.

The footage would then be used by Rey to extort the Spanish royal family for decades.

Cristo spoke about his involvement with The Telegraph UK, which published some of the images, saying he knew what he was being asked to do was wrong but was convinced to help his mother to help resolve her financial problems.

Cristo recently sold some of the photos to the Dutch magazine Privé.

Rey denied it was her son who made the secret recordings, insisting it was her brother.

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"The photographs were taken by my brother. My son says it was him, but it's not true.

"Why has my son done this to me? What has hurt me the most is that my son has depicted me as a bad mother."

Tapes of Juan Carlos' phone conversations with his mistress were recently published by the online news site OK Diario.

In the recordings, Juan Carlos described his marriage to Queen Sofía as loveless after the birth of their third child, the now King Felipe, in 1968.

"We have no family life," Juan Carlos tells Rey, in the conversation from the mid-1990s.

Spain's former King Juan Carlos, now 86, has been linked to a string of women while married to Queen Sofía.

He was widely popular for most of his almost 40-year reign, ruling Spain from 1975 until he abdicated the throne in 2014 for his son, now King Felipe VI.

But soon before his abdication, Juan Carlos became embroiled in a number of financial scandals.

The former monarch fled Spain for the UAE in 2020 after he was linked to an inquiry into alleged corruption.

But three investigations were dropped in March, 2022.

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