She was in Paris on the afternoon of October 3rd, 1990, when the telephone delivered the second great wound of her life. Out on the water off the Monaco coast, between the principality and Nice, her husband had been driving a 42-ft catamaran called the Pinot di Pinot at something close to 150 km/h when it struck a wave and flipped backward into the Mediterranean.
Patrice Innoceenti, the man beside him, was thrown clear and survived. Stefano Casiraghi, strapped to his seat as the helmsman took the full weight of a 5-ton boat coming down on top of him. And by the time the rescue crews reached the wreckage and ran him to the Princess Grace Hospital, there was nothing left to do but pronounce him dead on arrival.
He was 30 years old. She was 33. And she was now a widow with three children aged six, four, and three. None of whom she felt able to tell herself. So it fell to her father, Prince Rainier, to walk into a room in Monaco and explain to two small boys and a little girl that their father was not coming home.
There is a tidy and terrible symmetry to the way the Grimaldis grieve, and it announced itself again here. Stefano’s funeral would be held at Monaco’s Cathedral of St. Nicholas, the same building where exactly 8 years earlier the same family had buried Caroline’s mother. He [snorts] would be laid to rest at the Chapelle de la Paix beside Prince Pierre, his wife’s own grandfather.
The bride who had married him beneath a painted portrait of her dead mother now followed his coffin through streets that had watched her grow up. For seven centuries, the family she was born into had carried a story about itself, A piece of medieval folklore that insisted no Grimaldi would ever find happiness in marriage.
It was the kind of legend a dynasty repeats at christenings and laughs off at weddings. Until the day it stops being funny. By the autumn of 1990, it had stopped being funny for Caroline. She had married a Paris playboy her mother had warned her against and watched it collapse in 28 months.
She had lost that mother on a mountain road. She had now lost a husband to the sea. And within a few years she would begin to lose her hair to the sheer biological cost of the grief until an autoimmune storm took all of it. This is the story of a woman caught inside a curse her family had carried for 700 years who buried a mother and a husband before she was 34 and who rebuilt herself in a small town in Provence around three children and a court that having taken everything from her had nothing left to give her in
return. In today’s episode of Old Money Alure we trace how the eldest daughter of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier was groomed for the Monegasque throne. Married a Paris playboy her mother had warned her about lost her mother in a car crash she would never finish explaining lost a husband to a powerboat off the coast near Cap Ferrat lost her hair to grief and married a Hanoverian prince whose violence and breakdowns turned the third marriage into the same trap the curse had set for every Grimaldi woman before
her. Hello and welcome to today’s episode on Old Money and the history of wealthy families around the world. My name is Elizabeth and I’m your narrator for this episode. And if you’d like even more on the hidden history of wealthy families be sure to visit the first link in the video description to get access to our free Substack newsletter, where we have many years of extra videos and secret content.
That being said, thank you for your time, and let us begin. Caroline Louise Marguerite Grimaldi was born on January 23rd, 1957, at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco, the first child of Prince Rainier III and the former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly. And for 14 months, she was the heir presumptive to one of the oldest ruling houses in Europe.
That status ended on March 14th, 1958, the day her brother Albert was born, because Monaco’s succession rules preferred a son. And so, the firstborn was quietly leapfrogged before she could walk. It is worth pausing on that detail, because it tells you something about the architecture of the life she was being handed. The family she belonged to, the House of Grimaldi, traced itself back to 1297, when François Grimaldi seized the fortress of Monaco by disguising himself as a Franciscan monk and talking his way through the gate before drawing a blade.
A dynasty that begins with a man in a friar’s habit holding a knife is not a dynasty with illusions about how it survives. The stories behind figures like Caroline Grimaldi, the dynasties they were born to defend, and the marriages those dynasties consumed, receive extended treatment in our free Substack newsletter, where the personal and financial wreckage too complex for documentary format reveals what these extraordinary lives actually cost the women who lived them.
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The Grimaldi saga belongs in that company. Then there was the curse, which is where any honest account of this family has to tread carefully because it is legend rather than documented history. A tale amplified by 20th century tabloids and pinned after the fact onto a long sequence of real tragedies. The most common version holds that Prince Rainier the First, who ruled at the turn of the 14th century, kidnapped a Flemish woman and that she repaid him with a sentence laid upon every descendant who would ever come after.
Never will a Grimaldi find happiness in marriage. Other tellings swap the Flemish maiden for a witch condemned to burn at the stake or for a monk wronged in that founding deception of 1297, the insult to the holy habit itself calling down retribution. There is no 13th century document recording any of it.
What there is, instead, is a marital record across the generations so consistently catastrophic that the supernatural framing began to feel to the family and the public alike less like an explanation than a description. Caroline’s parents had two more children after her, Albert in 1958 and Stephanie in 1965, and each of the three would furnish the curse with fresh material across the decades to come.
But it was Caroline, the eldest, the one stripped of her birthright in infancy and then handed a different and heavier inheritance, who would end up living the legend most completely. She did not inherit a throne. She inherited the family’s particular talent for losing the people it loved. Whatever the succession laws said, Caroline was raised as a Grimaldi of consequence, and her education was built to match.
She passed through the Lycée Charles Foix in Saint-Maur, outside Paris, and then St. Mary’s School at Ascot, one of Britain’s elite Catholic boarding schools, before earning her French baccalauréat in 1974 with honors. She went on to Sciences Po in Paris for semester, and then to the Sorbonne, where she took a diploma in philosophy with minors in psychology and biology.
By the time she was finished, she was fluent in five languages: French, English, Spanish, German, and Italian. A range that would later make her a natural cultural diplomat and a UNESCO ambassador. And that, in the meantime, made her something the European press had never quite seen before. A princess who could quote philosophy in three tongues and still sell a magazine cover on her face alone.
Because the face was the problem, or at least the press treated it as the prize. Before her marriage, she was the undisputed cover star of European celebrity journalism, photographed at the casinos of Monaco, the nightclubs of Paris, the yachts strung along the Mediterranean. She moved through the world of international aristocracy, film stars, and socialites, and the paparazzi had found in her a nearly perfect subject.
The daughter of the most famous actress alive, raised in the most glamorous postage stamp of a country on Earth. Beautiful and young, and not yet sealed inside the full formality of the Monegasque court. Her parents were reportedly never comfortable with it. Grace Kelly had married into royalty in part to escape Hollywood’s invasions, only to discover that Monaco’s nearness to the French and Italian tabloids made the intrusion worse rather than better.
And her daughter’s wildness in the 1970s only sharpened the appetite. The intellectual formation that would eventually define Caroline’s adult life was in those years almost entirely invisible to the people consuming her image. She was a serious student in an area where the continental press cared far more about what she was wearing in Saint-Tropez than what she was reading at the Sorbonne.
The young woman they photographed at the casino tables was, off camera, the one earning a philosophy diploma with minors in psychology and biology. And the country that watched her could see only the first of those two people. That gap between the woman and the rumor of the woman would become the central conflict of her existence.
And decades later, she would take it all the way to the highest human rights court in Europe. For now, it simply made her the most watched young woman on the continent, which is a dangerous thing to be when you are also, by the terms of an old family story, supposed to be unlucky in love. Philippe Junot was born on April 19th, 1940, which made him 17 years older than the princess he set out to marry.
And the gap was the least of the warnings. He was a Parisian venture capitalist and property developer, the son of a deputy mayor of Paris, and the contemporary press painted him as the complete boulevardier, suntanned and charming and socially relentless, with business interests stretching from Paris to Spain to New York and an early stake in the Jack in the Box fast food chain.
They first crossed paths at Regine’s, the legendary Paris nightclub, somewhere around 1975 or 1976 and Junot proved a tenacious suitor. When Caroline was sent to the United States to put an ocean between them, he simply followed her across it. Prince Rainier agreed to the marriage grudgingly and only after London’s Daily Express published a photograph of a topless Caroline beside Junot on a yacht, at which point the engagement stopped being a romance and became an exercise in damage control.
Princess Grace harbored no illusions about any of it. According to the journalist Gwen Robins, Grace privately delivered a verdict of cold maternal precision. “I give it two years.” Caroline herself would later describe the whole episode as a product of naivety or maybe the spirit of rebellion. The wedding, when it came, was a final gorgeous performance of old world glamour regardless.
The civil ceremony took place on June 28th, 1978 at the Prince’s Palace followed by the religious ceremony on June 29th performed by Bishop Gilles Bart of Fréjus-Toulon, the same bishop who had married Grace and Rainier 22 years before and baptized Caroline 21 years before. Some 650 guests attended, among them Ava Gardner, Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra.
And the bride wore a white embroidered organdy gown by Christian Dior. It came apart almost as fast as Grace had predicted. Paparazzi caught Junot dancing with Agnete von Fürstenberg at a New York nightclub and Caroline’s long-serving bodyguard later remembered Juneau as a boy who loved to have fun in a way that could not coexist with a marriage.
At one point, the bodyguard recalled, “Caroline, who was very much in love with him, could no longer stand it.” Juneau conceded only that the nightclub incident was absolutely a mistake, insisting he had never been unfaithful while acknowledging the marriage had ended quickly enough that he was not looking for any medals. The civil divorce came through on October 9th, 1980, 28 months after the wedding.
Landing almost exactly on Grace’s sardonic schedule. The Vatican annulment took far longer. Caroline began the application in 1982, and as the daughter of a reigning monarch, was permitted to petition Pope John Paul II directly. And the annulment was finally granted on July 1st, 1992. Her mother had been right to the month.
And Caroline had learned the first lesson the family teaches its women, which is that the people who warn you are usually the ones who love you most, and that loving them does not make you listen. On the morning of Monday, September 13th, 1982, Princess Grace set out in her metallic green Rover P6 3500, a car already 11 years old, to drive down from the family’s country home at Roc Agel to the palace.
Beside her sat her youngest daughter, 17-year-old Princess Stephanie. Grace had reportedly dismissed her chauffeur that morning because luggage and dress boxes filled the back of the car. And the route she chose wound down a mountain road known to be treacherous. Shortly after 10:00, the car missed a curve and plunged more than 100 feet down a rocky embankment.
Stephanie escaped through the driver’s side window and early and never confirmed source of the rumor that she had been at the wheel, though multiple eyewitnesses placed Grace in the driver’s seat and she survived with a fractured vertebra in her neck that the doctors called miraculous given the wreckage. The first medical bulletins described Grace as stable with a broken thigh, a broken collarbone and rib injuries.
And they badly underestimated the trauma to her head. Later examination revealed two brain hemorrhages, the first most likely a stroke that had impaired her ability to control the car before it ever left the road. And the second, far more severe, caused by the impact itself. Stephanie remembered that her mother had complained of a headache that morning, a small detail that read in hindsight turns the whole catastrophe into something that may have begun inside Grace’s own skull before the curve arrived.
She never regained consciousness. By September 14th, the doctors told Prince Rainier that the brain damage was irreversible and the decision to terminate life support was his to make, taken with the agreement of Caroline and Albert. Stephanie, still in hospital, would not be told her mother was dead for another two days.
Grace Kelly died on September 14th, 1982 at the age of 52. On September 18th, close to 100 million television viewers watched the funeral cortege move through Monaco’s pink and oak streets to the Cathédrale Saint Nicholas, the same cathedral where Grace had married Rainier 26 years earlier. Princess Diana came and Nancy Reagan and Danielle Mitterrand.
Cary Grant, who had filmed To Catch a Thief beside Grace and counted her close friend, was visibly destroyed. Rainier wept repeatedly through the service. His head hung, his body half slumped, a man who his son would later say was never quite the same again after the accident. Albert covered his face with black gloved hands during Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
Caroline, a black mantilla over her head, wept and turned toward her father at the altar. And Stephanie could not come at all. Caroline was 25 years old, freshly divorced, with no particular aptitude yet for official life, and she had just become the only functioning adult left standing at the center of a shattered royal house.
The curse had taken its most luminous victim, and it had handed the survivor a job. Rainier never recovered from his wife’s death, and the principality could not afford to grieve indefinitely. So, into the void at the top of the Monegasque court, stepped his eldest daughter. Within months of Grace’s death, Rainier began appointing Caroline to the roles her mother had left empty.
She was named president of the Monaco Garden Club and president of the Arts Festival. And most consequentially, by sovereign decision in December 1982, president of the Princess Grace Foundation. The body established in her mother’s honor. It was a deliberate transfer of identity as much as office, an instruction to a 25-year-old that she was now to be the woman the country had lost.
And she accepted it. Rainier said as much the following year, in words that read as both tribute and confession of his own dependence. After Grace’s death, a miracle happened, he told the press. Princess Caroline filled her mother’s role. She embodies the same spirit as her mother. And I find great satisfaction in how she manages the duties I have entrusted to her.
There is a quiet cruelty buried in that sentence, however lovingly it was meant. A father who has lost his wife is describing the comfort of watching his daughter become her. The daughter, for her part, did the work. She held her grieving father together. She held the court together.
And she did it while carrying the unfinished business of her own divorce and the freshly excavated grave of her mother. She would go on serving as de facto first lady of Monaco from 1982 until 2011, nearly three decades. First standing in for her father and then, after Rainier’s death in 2005, for her brother Albert.
The role was never written into any constitution. It was simply assumed. The way the eldest child of a damaged house assumes the weight that no one else will lift. There was a second strange inheritance waiting for her inside the succession itself. She had been heir presumptive for 14 months as an infant before Albert displaced her.
And she would become heir presumptive again as a grown woman. This time for 9 years, beginning with Albert’s accession on April 6th, 2005 and lasting until the birth of his twins, hereditary Prince Jacques and Princess Gabriella, on December 10th, 2014. Because Albert’s acknowledged illegitimate children had been shut out of Monaco’s 2002 constitutional changes.
It was Caroline, by then in her late 40s and early 50s, and carrying the formal title of Hereditary Princess of Monaco, who stood next in line to one of the wealthiest sovereign states on Earth. The throne she had lost as a baby kept circling back toward her across the decades, never quite landing.
A crown that approached and withdrew like a tide. Grace Kelly had spent her life being looked at, first by Hollywood and then by the tabloids. And her death did not release her daughter from that gaze, so much as transfer it, intact and heavier, onto the next set of shoulders. Caroline did not step into a spotlight.
She inherited a stare and would spend the rest of her life learning what it costs to be unable to turn it off. The man who pulled her out of mourning was an Italian named Stefano Casiraghi, born on September 8th, 1960, in Milan. The son of Gian Carlo Casiraghi, a wealthy industrialist who made his fortune in heating and air conditioning equipment and kept the family as an estate called Villa Cicogna in Fino Mornasco.
Stefano had studied economics at Milan’s Bocconi University, but left without a degree, going into the family real estate and export businesses. The New York Times would later describe him as a financier and chairman of Cogefar France, a construction subsidiary of Fiat. And in 1984, he founded his own Monaco-based construction firm, Engeco.
At the time his first child was born, he was also director of the Christian Dior boutique in Monte Carlo. According to Italian reporting, It was Robertino Rossellini, son of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and an old close friend of Caroline’s, who introduced the two during a cruise in the summer of 1983.
Though another account has them meeting at a Monte Carlo disco. Either way, the courtship was swift. They married in a civil ceremony on December 29th, 1983, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Princely Palace, beneath a portrait of Caroline’s late mother. There was no Catholic wedding because the Vatican annulment of the Junot marriage was still pending and would not arrive until 1992, which meant the church still regarded her first marriage as valid.
Caroline was reportedly more than 3 months pregnant on the day, and when asked about marrying without the church’s blessing, she answered with a frankness that cut straight to what she had actually lost and actually wanted. “I wanted a real home and children,” she said. “It was difficult for my conscience, but I was overwhelmed by the desire to have children.
Surely that can be understood from a Christian point of view.” The children came in quick succession, all born at the Princess Grace Hospital Center. Andrea on June 8th, 1984, Charlotte on August 3rd, 1986, and Pierre on September 5th, 1987. The two younger ones were named for Caroline’s maternal grandparents, Princess Charlotte and Prince Pierre of Monaco.
By every account of those who knew them, this marriage was a happy one, a genuine contrast to the Junot chapter, and Caroline’s life changed shape around it. The couple divided their time between Monaco and a home outside Milan, and the woman who had once generated a weekly tabloid splash now lived comparatively quietly, family-oriented and sport-adjacent.
Photographed at tennis matches and on ski slopes and at the racing events where her husband chased his real passion. For 7 years, the curse seemed to have lost the threat of her. And she had built exactly the thing she had told the world she wanted, a real home and three children inside it. The children would not be legitimized under church law until February 1993 after the annulment and the convalidation issued by Pope John Paul II.
But the home itself needed no papal signature. It was the one thing she had managed to make for herself. It would last until a single morning on the water. Stefano Casiraghi was not a casual amateur on the scene. Over his career, he competed in 80 offshore powerboat races, won roughly a dozen of them, set a speed record of 277 km/h on Lake Como in 1984, and took the world championship off Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1989.
Going into the 1990 season as the reigning world champion, he had already decided to retire from the sport after the 1990 World Offshore Championship. He never reached the finish of it. And there had been a warning, the kind the family was always given and never seemed able to use. Just 3 weeks before the fatal race, his boat had exploded during a competition off the Isle of Guernsey, and he had walked away uninjured.
He had cheated death once in rough conditions and then died three weeks later in cleaner ones. On Wednesday, October 3rd, 1990, the World Offshore Championship ran along the coast near Car Far between Monaco and Nice in three to four-foot waves. Casiraghi, 30 years old, was driving his 42-foot catamaran, the Pinot di Pino, named for its Italian wine sponsor, with his throttleman Patrice Innocenti beside him.
About 15 minutes into the second heat, the leading group turned the buoy off Nice, and Casiraghi and Innocenti were trying to make up time because earlier in the race, they had stopped to rescue another pilot whose vessel had caught fire, an act of plain courage that had cost them the lead. Traveling at roughly 150 km/h, the catamaran struck a wave and flipped backward.
Innocenti was thrown clear of the craft and survived. Casiraghi stepped into throttleman’s seat, stayed with the boat, and took the full force of five tons of hull slamming into the water. A fellow competitor, Michael Carston, described it with the flat horror of a man who understood the physics. He surely didn’t have time to look out, and at that speed, stuck under the boat, must have been killed by the blow.
They pulled both men from the sea, and Stefano Casiraghi was pronounced dead on arrival at the Princess Grace Hospital in Monte Carlo. The experts who later studied the wreck concluded that he would most likely have survived had the catamaran carried a full canopy. And his death drove sweeping reforms through the sport.
Safety harnesses, closed hulls, and twin hull designs became compulsory, and races were moved closer to harbors where the water runs gentler. No title was awarded in the 1990 championship as a mark of respect. Caroline in Paris left for Monaco in black morning clothes, and Rainier told the children what had happened because she could not.
The man who had stopped his boat to save another driver had lost the seconds that might have saved himself. And the family added a husband to its ledger of the beautiful and the early dead. He was buried at the Chapelle de la Paix beside his wife’s grandfather. His funeral held at the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, 8 years almost to the season after Grace’s.
The home Caroline had built with her own hands was gone. And the woman who had spent her 20s holding everyone else together now had nothing left to hold but three children under the age of seven. What she did next was leave. In the months after Stefano’s death, Caroline moved with her children to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a small town in the south of France, in order, as her brother Albert later put it, to move away from the gossip and hoopla of Monaco.
They lived quietly in a rented villa. The children went to the local public school. The daughter of a sovereign house and the grandchildren of Grace Kelly filing into ordinary classrooms among ordinary village children. And the family integrated into the life of the town as completely as a family that famous can.
Caroline confirmed the period years later, describing how after his death, she retreated with her children to a small town in Provence where they could mourn in private. It was the closest thing to ordinary life any of them would ever have, and she had to bury a husband to get it. The grief did not stay inside her.
Beginning in 1996, Caroline started to lose her hair, and the doctors who commented on her condition believed it was alopecia totalis, an autoimmune disorder that can be triggered by severe and prolonged stress on top of a genetic predisposition. It is worth being precise about the framing here because she never confirmed the diagnosis herself, and the term came from medical commentators reading her appearance rather than from any palace announcement.
In time, she lost all of it, and eventually the hair grew back, but for a stretch of years, one of the most photographed women in Europe carried the physical evidence of her mourning on her own scalp, and her wardrobe contracted to match her interior weather, minimal and black and stripped of ornament. When she re-emerged after several months away from the cameras in Saint-Rémy, observers noted shorter hair and minimal makeup, the look of a woman who had decided that the performance was over.
There is no neater illustration of what the family’s losses actually do to a body than this. The curse, whatever it is, had reached past her marriages and her children and gone after the woman’s hair follicle by follicle. Between the second and third marriages, there was the French actor Vincent Lindon, a relationship that lasted several years through the early and mid-1990s, was widely reported, and never led to marriage.
It belongs to the Provence years, the quiet decade, the chapter in which Caroline was neither princess consort nor royal widow on display, but simply a mother raising three bereaved children in a French village and trying with a man who was not a prince to find an ordinary kind of happiness. That she did not marry Landon may be the most telling fact of the period.
She had married a playboy and watched it fail, married a sportsman she loved and watched the sea take him. And when an ordinary attachment offered itself, she let it stay ordinary. For a few years she was, by her family’s standards, almost free. She did not stay free. The man she married in 1999 was Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick, born in 1954, head of the German House of Hanover, a dynasty that had ruled the Kingdom of Hanover until Prussia swallowed it in 1866.
Through George I, through George I, the Hanoverians connect to the British Crown, which made Ernst August a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, and meant the marriage required the Queen to issue an order in council on January 11th, 1999, giving consent under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. By marrying a Roman Catholic, Ernst August forfeited his own place in the British line of succession.
He had been married before to Chantal Hochuli, with whom he had two sons. And he and Caroline had reportedly known each other for years before the relationship turned serious. They married in a quiet civil ceremony on January 23rd, 1999, Caroline’s 42nd birthday, in Monaco. The marriage carried a tangible upgrade in rank.
It elevated Caroline’s style from Her Serene Highness to Her Royal Highness, as Monaco recognized the Hanoverians’ former German royal titles, and she became the Princess of Hanover, outranking the style she had been born with. She was pregnant at the wedding, as she had been at her Casiraghi wedding 16 years before, and their daughter, Princess Alexandra Charlotte Ulrike Maryam Virginia of Hanover, was born on July 20th, 1999 in Vöcklabruck, Austria.
On paper, it looked like an ascent, a Grimaldi woman climbing from a serene to a royal highness. A fourth child arriving healthy, a third marriage that finally came with a crown attached. It was, in fact, the curse arriving in a new costume, and the costume was a title. The family story had always been specifically about marriage, about the impossibility of a Grimaldi finding happiness inside one.
And Caroline had now entered a third. She had been warned away from the first by her mother, and married him anyway. The second had ended in the water. The third would not kill anyone, but it would deliver the most prolonged and humiliating version of the family pattern she had yet endured. Because the man whose royal title had lifted her own would spend the next two decades making international spectacles of his rage and his drinking.
And she would watch the whole thing unfold under the same cameras that had followed her since girlhood. The rank was real. So was everything that came with the man who carried it. Ernst August’s conduct in the years after the wedding became a source of international embarrassment and private anguish, and the record reads like a charge sheet that never stops growing.
In 1999, he was accused of assaulting a journalist with an umbrella and settled the matter by paying a fine. In 2000, on the island of Lamu in Kenya, he became enraged at the noise from a disco run by a German businessman named Josef Brunlehner and allegedly attacked him with a knuckleduster. Kenyan police named him a prime suspect and he and Caroline left for Nairobi before the police could act.
That same year at the Expo 2000 World Exhibition in his own German city of Hanover, he was photographed urinating against the wall of the Turkish National Pavilion, an act that drew a formal diplomatic complaint from the Turkish Embassy and public demands for an apology. After which, in a piece of jurisprudence that captures the man entire, he sued the newspaper that published the photograph for invasion of privacy and won 9,900 euros.
The Kenya assault followed him through the courts for years. German law permits the prosecution of German citizens for offenses committed abroad and in 2004, he was convicted of aggravated assault and causing grievous bodily harm. He sought a retrial in 2008 claiming false evidence, his lawyers asserting that he had never owned a knuckleduster nor held one in his hand.
The 2009 retrial produced a conviction for battery and in 2011, the Higher Regional Court of Celle upheld it making the verdict final. Between and around the convictions ran a parallel record of physical collapse. On April 3rd, 2005, he was admitted to hospital with acute pancreatitis and fell the next day into a deep coma.
The timing blackly aligned with the death two days later, of his father-in-law, Prince Rainier III. He came out of the coma, but remained in intensive care, and afterward attributed the crisis to his hyperactive lifestyle and his problems with alcohol. Further alcohol-related hospitalizations were reported in 2011, 2017, and 2018.
And in February 2019, he underwent emergency surgery for pancreatitis, before being reported a week later to be suffering from throat cancer. The final stretch grew darker still. In July 2020, he was taken to the psychiatric unit of a hospital after calling the police for help, and then fighting the officers when they arrived.
Later that year, under the influence of alcohol and medication, he injured a police officer at his Austrian hunting lodge, threatened another officer with a baseball bat 5 days later, and in September 2020, was arrested on charges of threatening employees. An Austrian court handed down a 10-month suspended sentence, ordered him to move residences, and required him to undergo psychological counseling.
Caroline had separated from him by 2009 and returned to live permanently in Monaco, selling the house they had shared at Le Mee sur Seine, and the couple have never divorced. She had married a man whose violence would be litigated on three national stages, and whose body would betray him on hospital wards across two countries.
And she did the only thing the family had ever found to do with such a man, which was to leave the marriage standing on paper and walk out of it in every way that mattered. If the third marriage was the curse in its newest costume, the case that bears the name of that marriage was the one fight in which Caroline turned the family’s defining affliction into a permanent victory for everyone who came after her.
By the early 2000s, she had spent three decades as one of the most photographed women in Europe, trailed by paparazzi while shopping, dining, cycling, skiing, riding horses, and taking beach holidays. All of it without her consent. And the German courts had repeatedly thrown out her attempts to stop the publication, classifying her as a contemporary public figure par excellence, who simply had to tolerate being photographed in public places.
The argument that had been used against her was, in effect, that fame is a forfeiture, that a woman known to the public surrenders the ordinary privacy of buying bread or a courtyard. It was the same logic that had hounded her mother out of Hollywood and into a principality that turned out to be no refuge at all.
And Caroline had been living under it since she was a teenager. She decided to fight it to the end. In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg decided the case of von Hanover versus Germany, and on June 24th, the third section found unanimously that Germany had violated Caroline’s right to private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights when its courts denied her damages over photographs of her shopping, sitting in a restaurant courtyard, and at a private beach club.
The reasoning reshaped European privacy law. The decisive question, the court held, was whether the photographs contributed to a debate of general interest, and these did not, serving only to satisfy readers’ curiosity about a celebrity’s private life. Even people known to the general public, it ruled, could legitimately expect not to be followed constantly by photographers.
And the German test, which had granted privacy only when a public figure was in spatial isolation from everyone else, was too vague and too hard to prove. Publishing the images, the judgment concluded, did not contribute to a public debate, but served merely to satisfy the curiosity of a particular readership. The German government declined to seek a referral to the Grand Chamber, so the judgment became final.
And it now sits in European media law curricula as the foundational precedent for celebrity privacy rights. A second case, von Hannover versus Germany number two, brought by Caroline and Ernst August together over photographs from a ski holiday, reached the Grand Chamber in 2012, which found no violation as to one image, since it ran alongside an article about Rainier’s illness, and so touched a genuine matter of public interest, while confirming that two others had breached her privacy.
The combined jurisprudence laid down binding criteria that European courts must apply when weighing privacy against press freedom for public figures. It is arguably the most consequential thing Caroline ever did, and it is worth holding the shape of it in mind. The woman the curse had turned into a lifelong subject of the camera used the law to draw a line around every private citizen the camera might find next.
The girl photographed topless on a yacht in 1978, whose mother had married into royalty precisely to escape such cameras, became in 2004 the legal author of the right to be left alone, a right the rest of Europe would inherit from her. She could not undo what had been done to her. She made certain the doing of it became at last against the rules.
The pattern Caroline lived was not hers alone, and to see the legend clearly, you have to set her beside the others. Her father’s aunt, Princess Antoinette, married three times, ending with the British ballet dancer John Gilpin, who died 6 weeks after their 1983 wedding. Her younger sister, Stephanie, who had survived the car that killed their mother, married her bodyguard, Daniel Ducruet, in 1995, and divorced him in 1996, after photographs surfaced of him with a cabaret singer, then later married a
circus acrobat in a union that ended the following year. Their brother, Albert, acknowledged two illegitimate children before marrying Charlene Wittstock in 2011, at a wedding where photographs showed the bride weeping throughout the ceremony. Against that backdrop, the legend re-examines itself, and what it turns out to describe is not witchcraft, but exposure.
A family famous since 1297 simply has more of its tragedies recorded and stitched into a single story than a family that lived and died unwatched. Grace Kelly died on a real mountain road from two real hemorrhages. Stefano Casiraghi died because a catamaran lacked a canopy at 150 km an hour and Ernst August drank. The legend supplies not a cause, but a frame.
A way of making ordinary human catastrophes feel like the working out of a sentence pronounced before any of the sufferers were born. The legacy Caroline built sits on the other side of that ledger. And it is the answer she gave. From the wreckage, she assembled one of the deepest records of cultural patronage in European royal history.
She founded Les Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1985 with the choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot. Realizing a dream her late mother had carried and reconnecting Monaco with the Russian ballet tradition that had flourished there a century before. She took over the foundation Prince Pierre and its literary and musical prizes in 1988, Led Amade Mondial from 1993, and the Princess Grace Foundation across more than four decades, and served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador from December 2003 for her work protecting children and
securing education for girls and women. The woman the press had once reduced to a face on a yacht had spent 40 years turning a dead mother’s institutions into the living cultural life of a country. Her three Casiraghi children grew up and out into the world she had tried to shelter them from. Andrea married Tatiana Santo Domingo in 2013 and stands forth in Monaco’s line of succession.
Pierre, who as a small boy lost his father to a powerboat, grew into an offshore racing enthusiast himself, taking up the very sport that had killed Stefano. As if the family could not stop reaching back toward the thing that hurt it. And Charlotte, the philosopher who founded the Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, divorced the film producer Dimitri Rassam in 2024, four years after marrying him at an abbey near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the same town where Caroline had taken her children to mourn their father. So
that the daughter’s marriage ended in the precise landscape where the mother had once buried her grief. The story does not resolve. It folds back on itself, generation after generation, town after town. And the woman at the center of it buried a mother and a husband before 34, lost her hair to the cost of it, walked out of a third marriage with her dignity and a landmark privacy judgment intact, and spent the rest of her life proving that a Grimaldi who cannot find happiness in marriage can at least build something
the legend can’t touch. And now, we’d like to see you in the comments. Do you think Caroline’s life proves the Grimaldi curse is real? Or do you think the family’s tragedies are simply the cost of seven centuries of public life lived under a camera that never blinks? We look forward to hearing your personal thoughts below.
