Who is Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi - Thai king’s consort become victim of photo leak?

OCY [email protected] December 24, 2020 | 19:15

Around 1,400 selfies of photos of Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, official mistress of Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn, have been leaked to anti-monarchy activists. These pictures are alleged as factional palace game. Let's take an insight into Thai king’s consort's life.

Thai king’s mistress Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi victim of mass photo leak

Who is Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi - Thai king’s consort become victim of photo leak?

Photo: EveningStandard.com

Hundreds of photos depicting the official mistress of Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn have been leaked to anti-monarchy activists, a report said Tuesday.

Some 1,400 selfies of Sineenat “Koi” Wongvajirapakdi — many of them sexually explicit — were allegedly leaked earlier this year to prominent critics of the Thai monarchy living abroad, according to the Daily Beast.

“There were 1,400 photographs from four different iPhones. Some of them were very intimate photos,” one of the recipients, British commentator Andrew MacGregor Marshall, told the outlet.

Marshall said he received a letter — initially sent to an address he no longer uses — containing an SD card with the photos.

“I made the decision not to publish them,” said Marshall. “They had obviously been sent to me without her consent, but also I just saw this is as a factional palace game.”

Reports at the time of Wongvajirapakdi’s detention in October 2019 said she had tried to usurp the queen.

Marshall also said he received a threat around the time he was sent the SD card.

“Earlier in August my house in Scotland was surveilled and a threat was left on the doorstep so it was quite a worrying time and the last thing I wanted was to get dragged into palace politics,” he told the Daily Beast.

While Marshall did not publicly release any of the photos, he confirmed that he had received them in support of another critic of the Thai monarchy, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, who did release them.

“From the timing of the whole thing it was clearly an attempt to sabotage her return to court,” Marshall told the outlet. “In any royal court, you get factional fighting. It is a notorious element of palace life. When you are a monarch with a wife and queen and you appoint consort, it is a recipe for vicious infighting.”, according to nypost.com.

Fell from grace in 2019

According to Thai Political Prisoners, at the time, the official announcement “accused Sineenat of attempting to prevent Queen Suthida from being crowned and abusing her royal status.” Reports of the announcement stated:

Sineenat not only “expressed her opposition and exerted her pressure in every possible way” regarding Queen Suthida’s elevation to the throne as the Queen of Thailand, but she also sought to have His Majesty the King appointed her to the role instead.

The announcement concluded that: "Her actions are considered disloyal, ungrateful, and ungracious of [the king’s] kindness…. They caused division among the royal servants and misunderstanding among the public; these amount to acts of sabotage against the country and the institution".

She was stripped of all royal ranks, decorations, and her military rank in October 2019.

Sudden released after just one year

Maha Vajiralongkorn, the king of Thailand, has allegedly pardoned his pilot concubine, whom he had thrown in jail last year, and has flown her to Germany to join his harem, according to The Sun Times.

Photo: DailyMail.com

Since October 2019, the whereabouts of Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi had been uncertain. The king had reportedly stripped his former concubine her of her titles and government ranks and imprisoned her, amid allegations about her “disloyalty” and alleged ambitions to be queen.

But on Aug. 27, a Boeing 737 plane from the king’s private fleet was dispatched to Bangkok’s Lat Yao Central Women’s Prison, at which the concubine was said to have been kept. According to journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a regional expert, she was flown to Munich, via a refueling stop in Dubai, where she was personally received by the king and driven to the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in the German resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

While public knowledge of Sineenat’s personal life is limited (as her official biography, which was released by the palace in August, has since been removed from the bureau of the royal household’s website), here’s what you should know about Sineenat.

Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi - From an ordinary nurse to noble consort

Photo: LondonEveningStandard.com

Born on January 26, 1985, in Thailand’s northern province of Nan, Sineenat first worked as a nurse after graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the Army Nursing College in 2008.

In 2015, Sineenat joined the king’s bodyguard corps, where she completed a variety of military courses, including jungle warfare and parachuting, and obtained a private pilot’s license. She then moved up to serve as a major general before becoming the royal consort.

In July 2019 she was gifted the title of royal consort to mark the king’s 67th birthday — the first time in nearly a century that a Thai monarch had taken a consort. And, in August, Sineenat received huge palace-arranged propaganda as the king’s favorite, cites vietnamtimes.org.vn.

While Thai monarchs have a history of electing royal consorts – who, in Thailand’s case, are official companions to the king, in addition to his wife – the title has not been used since the country became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. The last king to publicly take a consort was King Rama VI, who ruled from 1910 to 1925.

The title of consort placed Sineenat in a polygynous relationship with Queen Suthida, 41, Vajiralongkorn’s fourth wife, according to South China Morning Post.