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Old 10-16-2016, 17:09   #11
Oldrotorhead
Guerrilla Chief
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Texas
Posts: 830
Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Dog New Trick View Post
My wife says this is completely fabricated BS.
If it is BS I will remove it. However even the NY Times reports a lot of turmoil and irrational behavior by the new King.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/wo...rehension.html

The crown prince, 64, has led a stormy life of byzantine quarrels and breakups with various lovers that were rarely fully elucidated in public. To his critics, his romantic liaisons have been more than just a royal soap opera; they have raised questions about whether his character suits the institution he is about to lead.

Having multiple lovers is a dynastic tradition — his great-grandfather King Rama V had more than 150 wives and consorts — but the prince’s former partners have endured spiteful separations and the purged members of his entourage have died under suspicious circumstances. His three divorces, and the brusque ways they were handled, turned many Thais against him and left a trail of broken families, including four children in the United States with whom he has cut ties.

The crown prince returned to Thailand in time to be present for his father’s death on Thursday. But the timing of his accession remains in question. Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, the prime minister, surprised the nation on Thursday when he told reporters that the prince had decided to wait until the “appropriate time” to ascend the throne, which is still replete with the ancient pageantry and extreme formality made famous by the musical “The King and I.”
Photo
King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, left, and the crown prince in Bangkok in 2015. Credit Phamorn Manapornchai/Daily News, via Associated Press

What details are known of the crown prince’s life are whispered and passed along furtively on social media in Thailand, where the military government, enforcing a strict lèse-majesté law, has sentenced dozens of people to long prison terms for offending the monarchy. The law has been interpreted broadly, stifling most public discussion of anything related to the royal family.

But the few details that have emerged in public records, leaked documents and videos, and in publications from abroad offer a glimpse into the man who stands to be Thailand’s next king.

The prince was still married to his first wife, his cousin Soamsawali Kitiyakara, in the 1970s and ’80s when he fathered five children with another woman, according to Thai news accounts at the time. The other woman, an aspiring actress and a commoner, Sujarinee Vivacharawongse, would become his second wife.

That second marriage ended in the late 1990s in such acrimony that a public notice was posted at the prince’s palace accusing Ms. Sujarinee of corruption and infidelity with a soldier. The prince cut off communication with four of the five children from the marriage, stripped them of their royal titles and diplomatic passports, and wrote letters, since posted online by an exiled academic, to their British boarding schools informing them that he would no longer pay their tuition. They now live in the United States, as does their mother.

His third marriage, also to a commoner, Srirasmi Suwadee, in 2001, produced the boy who is considered the next heir to the throne, Prince Dipangkorn Rasmijoti, 11, who lives in Bavaria with his father.

Thais got a rare insight into the third marriage when a video clip of an elaborate poolside birthday party circulated widely on computer discs and on the internet. The video, which showed the princess topless with a string bikini bottom being attended to by submissive palace staff, scandalized a public accustomed to perceiving the monarchy as a paragon of virtue.

It was never clear how the video had been leaked but some suggested that the prince’s enemies had spread it to promote the possibility that his sister Princess Sirindhorn, beloved by the public for her devotion to charitable causes, could become monarch in his stead.
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