A Belgian prince has been photographed with his look-alike love child for the first time.
Prince Laurent of Belgium took a photograph with his previously unknown 25-year-old son that shows an uncanny resemblance between the two.
The photograph comes days after Laurent, 61, publicly recognized Clément Vandenkerckhove as his child with singer and actress Wendy Van Wanten, whose real name is Iris Vandenkerckhove.
“We have spoken openly and honestly about this over the past few years,” the prince’s statement read.
Clément was born in 2000, the same year Laurent met his wife, Claire Louise Coombs, 51, the Daily Mail reports.
The royal couple has three children together: daughter Princess Louise, 21, and twin Princes Nicolas and Aymeric, 19.
Both the prince’s announcement acknowledging his paternity and the recently released photograph come as VTM premieres the documentary Clément, Son of…, in which Clément tells his story for the first time.
Belgian royal journalist Wim Dehandschutter’s X account quotes the documentary, noting that when the prince’s secret son first called him in 2020, Laurent replied, “How are you?” The two then spoke for 40 minutes, according to the documentary.
“My father suggested to take a DNA test. We went to the hospital together. He told me, ‘I’ll go first, so you feel comfortable,’” Vandenkerckhove said in the documentary. “A few weeks later we had the results. I received an email from the lab saying the DNA was a 99.5% match.”
Laurent and Van Wanten met in the mid-1990s. Though they never confirmed a romance, they were spotted together on several occasions, including at the 1999 wedding of Britain’s Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones, according to Belga News Agency.
Laurent is the younger brother of King Philippe, who has been the monarch since 2013. Their father, former King Albert II, also officially recognized an illegitimate daughter—now known as Princess Delphine of Belgium—in 2020.
In 2023, Laurent was accused of fraud and extortion by Libya’s sovereign wealth fund over a failed reforestation project run by his NGO, which collapsed following the outbreak of the Libyan Civil War in 2011.
Laurent’s various other spectacles in Belgium have earned him the nickname “The Cursed Prince” in his home country.
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