Soria. Monday, May 27. The head of the Court of Instruction number 2 rules that the four children that the rider and aristocrat José Leoncio González de Gregorio had – for those not initiated in national genealogy, who was the husband of the red duchess, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo – must reach an agreement to share the inheritance of their father, who died in 2008. It is a legacy that their first-born daughter, Rosario Bermudo, will be able to enjoy 16 years after his death. And she did not manage to be recognized as her father’s daughter until 2016, when she obtained a DNA test from the nobleman from Soriano that demonstrated without a doubt that she was the fruit of a romantic relationship that he had in 1950 with one of the maids who works at home. Four years later, he married the red duchess, from whom his three recognized children would be born: Leoncio Alonso González de Gregorio, Pilar Leticia González de Gregorio and Gabriel Ernesto González de Gregorio. Rosario is going to change her last name now, 74 years after she was born. Her mother always resigned herself to being one of the women of humble origins who came to serve, who were waitresses, dancers… and who became pregnant by a man from a good family who refused to recognize her baby.
The decision of the Soria judge does not appear in the book The DNA that gave birth to you (Editorial Pábilo), which has just been published by journalist Fermín Cabanillas, but the entire previous story is detailed. Rosario is a clear example of “the young man’s daughter or son”, the pattern that follows in almost all the cases of paternity claims that are included in the book, most of them directed by the Sevillian lawyer Fernando Osuna. “What underlies everyone is a bestial selfishness, classism, materialism… machismo, in short,” explains the lawyer by videoconference, during a stop on his car trip from Logroño, where he has come to defend another case of recognition of filiation. “The alleged father meets a woman, they begin to date her and that harmony changes radically as soon as she becomes pregnant. “She leaves the mother alone, generally in a dramatic economic situation, while he takes advantage of her position of economic and cultural superiority…” he continues.
Osuna has specialized in cases of paternity claims. To guarantee judicial recognition of a parentage, DNA has become a decisive test. “Getting a detective to take a DNA sample goes a long way toward achieving a favorable sentence,” she says. This process is not at all simple. All biological remains taken must be documented and kept in custody so that they are accepted in court. Obtaining the Julio José Iglesias bottle from which the samples that determined that Javier Santos is the son of the singer Julio Iglesias were extracted is a clear example of the importance of the analysis of genetic remains in this type of lawsuits.
The vital custody of DNA samples
That bottle has already become a recurring classic in the tabloid ecosystem, but finding it and ensuring that the evidence was not lost or contaminated was the result of long and intense work carried out by the Dos Hermanas detective company IPS. (Seville). An episode that is told in detail in the book. “All the work involved in documenting the obtaining of evidence so that the judge has no doubt is like a movie image of agent 007,” explains Cabanillas. The author refers to how the investigators flew to Miami with various strategies to obtain the DNA, either of the singer or of one of the three children he had with Isabel Preysler. They ruled out going after the alleged father or Enrique Iglesias because of the security that surrounded them and the isolated and privileged area in which they resided. After rejecting Chábeli’s option, they found that Julio José was the most accessible and took advantage of a surf break to grab a sports bottle from the sand on the beach that had been left there. Because the container was never stolen, as the singer’s son claimed in an interview, since, if it had been stolen, the test would have been invalidated.
But they didn’t just take the bottle. During the month of surveillance, they obtained many more samples and the problem arose when they had to take the plane back. Added to the problems of airport controls was that if they put everything in a suitcase and it got lost, they would be left without a case. So they kept the evidence among their clothes and that’s how they flew until they left them in a laboratory in Zaragoza. The DNA analysis offered a 99.9% match, the highest that can be obtained. And although a court of first instance in Valencia ruled that Santos was the son of Julio Iglesias, the court that heard the appeal understood that it was a matter of res judicata, because his mother, not him, had already initiated another paternity claim lawsuit. years ago that did not prosper.
Santos has been fighting in court for more than 20 years. It is one of the cases that has lasted the longest, but it is not an exception. “These processes are prolonged because the alleged parents or siblings have financial means and raise resources,” explains Osuna, who has just come from a case in which the possible parent has justified that he did not want to give his DNA because he did not trust that the court was going to make that information public. Many of his proceedings are being appealed before the European Court of Human Rights due to the accumulated delay in their processing.
Cemeteries restraining order
There are many subterfuges used by the defendants in paternity proceedings or by their children—the people from whom it is most reliable to obtain a DNA match—to avoid giving up that sample, to the point that, as detailed in the book, Osuna has on more than one occasion requested restraining orders from the grave of the alleged deceased father to prevent his relatives from cremating him and eliminating the genetic trace. Precisely, the fact of cremating someone’s body without authorization to prevent genetic tests from being taken served as a basis to prove the parentage of a waiter from Utrera who went on to collect a million-dollar inheritance, as narrated in the book.
Because, although DNA is a decisive test, it is not the only one by which judges are governed. “WhatsApp messages, emails, letters from the sixties or seventies or physical resemblance are also considered to recognize paternity,” he explains. They are also alternatives for clients who do not have the financial capacity to pay for obtaining DNA. This is how justice determined the paternity of soccer player Samuel Eto’o with respect to his daughter Erika, when she was already 24 years old — a good part of the process was spent locating the player to notify him of the lawsuit, in another example of maneuvers to evade the evidence of paternity-. The judge ordered him to pay him maintenance of 90,000 euros in compensation for all unpaid pensions until then.
If seeing paternity recognized implies, in most cases, spending around 10 years fighting in court, managing to collect the inheritance to which that son or daughter is entitled, after decades of abandonment, contempt and, on many occasions, humiliation on the part of the from the parent to the mother or the offspring themselves, it is a much more arduous path. This is the case of Carlos Koplowitz, who was born a year after the death of his father, businessman Ernesto Koplowitz, in 1962, the result of an extramarital relationship. It took him 25 years to be recognized as a legitimate son, but he still has not seen a euro of the millionaire inheritance that corresponded to him and that at the time was divided into four parts, corresponding to the four children that he already had at the time. His mother asked her in a letter to forget about fighting for what was hers. “It’s impossible to win,” she said.
“These billionaire ladies [Esther y Alicia Koplowitz, dos de las hermanas de Carlos] They have no sensitivity, their brother lives in Switzerland as a sports teacher and the salary does not reach him,” explains Osuna, about this specific case. “I think it’s all a matter of ego, I don’t see any other explanation for people who generally have their lives resolved and who suddenly see that there is evidence proving that they have had a child in their youth,” adds Cabanillas, opening the reflection to other examples. which he includes in his book, like that of Julio Iglesias.
Psychological consequences
If a father disowns the mother of his son and allows her to raise his child alone and without financial help, if later his brothers also oppose integrating him into the family and sharing with him what is rightly his, what does it make them to undertake a legal battle, very expensive and whose ending is almost never a fairy tale? “They do it for dignity and justice. Above all, so that mothers who were rejected for becoming pregnant are recognized. They want the judge to grant them that dignity,” says the lawyer. “And those who are economically weaker, also, why not? They seek to inherit, because they have had a lot going on as children, with an absent father, and emotional deficiencies in the sentimental and family sphere, in addition to economic hardships,” he adds.
Behind the most media cases, and those that do not transcend, there is much more than the curiosity of knowing how the DNA was obtained or how and when the parents met and how different the lives of those who claim are and that of their families. legitimate brothers. There are psychological problems motivated by the absence of the father figure or by the humiliations that their mothers have suffered for demanding their rights – in a trial, Santos was even told that since at the time she conceived him, she slept with many, the child could be anyone’s; episodes of bullying, anxiety due to the stress of endless processes due to the bad faith of the defendants…
The case that deviates from this pattern is one of the best known on the social scene. The recognition of the paternity of Manuel Benítez, the Cordovan, regarding his son, Manuel Díaz. It is the process that Osuna is most proud of. “He is the most complete and the happiest,” she acknowledges. “It is the only case I know of in which there is a good family relationship between the brothers,” says Cabanillas.
It does not seem that this will be the case for Rosario, although her brother Gabriel, who was present at Monday’s trial, advocated for “leaving pride and personal issues” behind. Osuna explains that in this time all the brothers – who also do not get along with each other – have resorted to all the steps, delaying the process. Rosario could pocket between 1.5 and 2.5 million euros. “They are going to reach an agreement because the costs in this type of process are going to be very high,” Osuna acknowledges. Rosario, who lives in Écija, wants to buy a house so that her husband, who cannot move, can go outside because right now the wheelchair does not fit through the door of their house, as she explained this week in a program television.
