Linda de Mol about revelations The voice: ‘We are rich and powerful, so you have to break’

Linda de Mol says she won’t say anything more. But not without first lashing out at ‘sensation-seeking opinion makers’ who wrote and spoke about the scandal at The Voice. “Of course I didn’t know.”

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She would ‘tell everything honestly and openly’, writes the Dutch actress and presenter Linda de Mol on the site of her own magazine Linda. ‘That was my intention. As soon as I got a little bit out of the black hole again, I would tell my story on my own platform. After yesterday I decided not to say anything at all.’

Broken

That black hole was created after revelations about repeated sexually transgressive behavior behind the scenes of the TV program The Voice of Holland. Not only was her brother, media mogul John De Mol, responsible for that program until 2019, her now ex-partner Jeroen Rietbergen was the orchestra leader there and is accused of scandalous behavior by various women. After the revelations in Tim Hofman’s online program Boos, Linda de Mol announced the break with Rietbergen.

The most powerful media family in the Netherlands is under fire today. Linda de Mol speaks of ‘a bizarre smear campaign’. She mentions the names of ‘a handful of sensation-seeking journalists’: Beau, Rob Goossens, Youp van’t Hek and ‘that sad, intensely fake Angela de Jong’. De Mol writes that everything she says is described by them as ‘twisting, lying, covering up, exercising power, disguising’. De Mol seems to know what their motives are for this. “We’re rich and powerful, so you’ll have to die.”

‘My brother spoke the full truth’

The question of how much the de Mol family knew before everything became public is heard loudly in the Netherlands. And that volume went up even more when it became known that two women already knocked on the door of Linda magazine in 2020 to tell them that they had been victims of transgressive behavior by The voice coach Ali B. The magazine did not publish anything about it at the time. According to creative director Jildou van der Bijl, their research came to a dead end.

John de Mol heads Talpa, who made The Voice at the time. The magazine Linda is now also part of Talpa. But that parent company was not warned.

‘It was the express wish of the victims, who confidentially told us their sad story about Ali B, that I would not tell their stories to my brother’, writes de Mol. She adds that her magazine brought “the girls” into contact with Hofman, which she says “proves once again that she had no idea of ​​her own husband’s misbehavior on The Voice.” ‘Of course I didn’t know that. And my brother spoke the full truth when he said he was aware of only one incident.’

‘The lie is with someone else’, she continues, ‘someone who turns out to have a serious addiction’. By this she is referring to Rietbergen, with which she implicitly says that she is also a victim of him.

Call to victims

Linda de Mol calls on the victims to contact her. “I’d love to be able to tell you personally how sorry I am and that I would have done something about it had I known, but I didn’t know.”

But in public she says she will keep her lips tight. ‘I won’t say anything anymore and will withdraw for the time being to finally get to the grief together with my children, who have loved their bonus father dearly. And let my family support me, because yes, we are there for each other.’

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