WARSAW — Karol Nawrocki, a historian and amateur boxer aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump, will be inaugurated as Polish president on Wednesday amid a hubbub over his football hooligan past and a property deal that triggered a criminal probe.
While the presidency will grant the nationalist politician immunity from prosecution, that has hardly quelled the noise surrounding a series of sometimes surreal scandals that bubbled to the surface in the run-up to the June 1 election, which Nawrocki won with 50.98 percent of the vote.
The controversies range from his bizarre use of a crime writer alter ego to lavish praise upon himself to far more serious allegations of involvement with gangsters and prostitution at a luxury hotel on the Baltic Sea.
Former President Lech Wałęsa, a Nobel-laureate dissident who led the Solidarity movement that toppled Communist rule, said he was refusing to attend the “disgraceful spectacle” of Nawrocki’s inauguration.
Here’s a recap of the most contentious past activities that are likely to dog the new president of Poland, a NATO heavyweight and the EU’s fifth most populous country.
Apartment investigation
Prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into whether an elderly man — identified only as Jerzy Ż — was swindled between 2012 and 2017 into transferring ownership of his apartment in the northern city of Gdańsk. The prosecutors do not directly name Nawrocki but are probing the circumstances of his acquisition of the property.
The apartment probe follows three formal complaints, including one from Gdańsk Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, who hails from the liberal and pro-EU Civic Coalition party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The probe centers on whether Jerzy Ż was deceived into “unfavorably” transferring ownership of property worth €28,000 in exchange for promises of “care and assistance in everyday life.”
Fraud carries a penalty of six months to eight years in prison but Nawrocki is in no immediate danger. As head of state, he is answerable only to the State Tribunal, a special court for top officials, putting him beyond the reach of ordinary criminal courts during his five-year term. After that, he could once again face legal action, though much will depend on whether he stands for a second term.
Nawrocki insists he did nothing wrong and acted only out of good intentions toward Jerzy Ż.
“I have numerous witnesses who can attest that I offered assistance to Mr. Jerzy—providing him with financial support and running errands on his behalf. During my foreign trips, it was my colleagues and associates who ensured he continued to receive my support,” Nawrocki said in an interview with Wirtualna Polska, a major news website.
“Looking you squarely in the eye as president-elect, I can say: ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of,’” Nawrocki added.
The case has only been made more turbid by a report in the Gazeta Wyborcza daily citing Mariusz Duszyński, spokesperson for Gdańsk’s prosecutor’s office, that the same Jerzy Ż was jailed in 2011 for sexual assault, just before the period under investigation.
Pimping denials
The most egregious accusation — even leveled against Nawrocki by Prime Minister Tusk — is that the incoming president was involved in pimping at a luxury hotel at Sopot, a beach resort on the Baltic Sea. It is an assertion Nawrocki strenuously denies.
Tusk accused the leadership of the conservative nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which supported Nawrocki’s presidential bid, of knowing “about the connections with the gangsters, about ‘arranging for girls’ … about the apartment fraud and other matters still hidden.”
The story first appeared in May on Onet, another major news website, which gathered testimony that Nawrocki had arranged prostitutes for guests of the hotel where he was working for security — in return for a cut of the cash for himself.
Following the Onet report, a member of parliament for Civic Coalition appeared on television to vouch for it. “I have knowledge that all the information presented … in the Onet article is simply true,” Agnieszka Pomaska, a member of parliament for the region where the alleged offenses took place, told TVN24.
Nawrocki sued Onet over the story. Still, his critics point out that he, significantly, did not do so under the special fast-track “election mode” of court proceedings that would have required a final decision within 48 hours for allegations made during a campaign. Now, the case will likely take months, if not years, to resolve.
Asked by Wirtualna Polska whether the allegations were false, Nawrocki said: “Absolutely. I was slandered.”
“The hotel hosted everyone from [Russian President] Vladimir Putin to political elites and music stars performing at the Sopot Festival. What guests do for entertainment is their business — I had nothing to do with it. My job was to ensure their safety and security,” he added.
Football hooliganism
Nawrocki admitted he took part in a brawl between hooligans from rival football clubs from Gdańsk and Poznań in 2009 when he was 26 and had just begun work in the Institute for National Remembrance, a state agency tracking Nazi and Communist crimes against Poles.
The fight, which the keen pugilist Nawrocki called “sparring,” had been investigated at the time, with Wirtualna Polska reporting that some of the participants had serious criminal records.
During the election campaign, Nawrocki embraced his on-brand heritage as a fighter, saying he took part in “sporting, noble fights.”
“When I sparred with someone — let me stress, always with willing participants — I never ran a background check or asked for their criminal record. It’s entirely possible that some of them had done bad things. But that doesn’t mean their actions reflect on me in any way,” Nawrocki said in the interview for Wirtualna Polska.
The president-elect conceded, however, that he overstepped by calling the brawls “noble” during the campaign.
More apartments in Gdańsk
Another allegation concerns Nawrocki’s personal use of apartments at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, a national institution, when he was its director of the between 2017 and 2021.
The case was first reported by Gazeta Wyborcza in early 2025.
“As director of the Museum of the Second World War, Nawrocki stayed in a deluxe apartment within the museum’s hotel complex for half a year—despite living just 5 kilometers away. The PiS-backed presidential candidate did not pay for the accommodation and now denies any wrongdoing,” the newspaper wrote.
Following the report, the prosecutor’s office in Gdańsk opened an investigation in February into allegations that Nawrocki stayed in the apartments free of charge for a total of 201 days. The probe is ongoing.
If the apartments had been rented out commercially, Gazeta Wyborcza claimed, the museum would have made 120,000 złoty (€28,000).
Nawrocki denies he made the museum apartments his second home, insisting he stayed there during the coronavirus quarantine and also used the apartments for official meetings with domestic and foreign guests.
Another investigation — though not formally targeting Nawrocki—concerns the disappearance of 8,000 albums of historical materials from the main exhibition of the museum. The albums went missing from museum storage between April and June 2020, during Nawrocki’s tenure as director.
The current museum leadership believes the items were destroyed, resulting in financial damage of no less than 200,000 złoty. The investigation is ongoing.
Alter ego
Within the realm of the odd rather than potentially criminal, a 2018 interview given to a Gdańsk branch of TVP, Poland’s public broadcaster, resurfaced during the election campaign.
The interview was with a Tadeusz Batyr, a writer exploring the Polish underworld of the 1990s. He heaped praise on a book by Nawrocki.
The twist? Batyr turned out to be Nawrocki himself, his face blurred and voice distorted to protect his identity from mobsters.
Nawrocki defended himself by saying: “Literary pseudonyms are nothing new in Polish journalism, literature and academia.”
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