A 26-year-old former car salesman in Belgium is now a prince. Prince Laurent, the younger brother of King Philippe, legally recognized Clément Vandenkerckhove as his biological son before a registrar of civil status in February. Details of the ceremony only surfaced this week.
The recognition makes him a legal heir to Prince Laurent’s estate and gives him a claim to the style His Royal Highness Clément Vandenkerckhove, Prince of Belgium. Belgian lawyers differ on whether that follows automatically or still needs a royal decree signed by King Philippe and the government; none has been announced. It does not give him a paycheck, a spot in the line of succession, or a single official duty. Belgium changed him from a guy on a dealership lot to a royal on paper, and left it there.
Vandenkerckhove was born on August 16, 2000, during a seven-year relationship between Prince Laurent and Iris Vandenkerckhove, a Flemish model and singer better known by her stage name, Wendy Van Wanten. The relationship ended before Laurent married British-born Claire Coombs, now Princess Claire, in 2003.
The DNA test they took together
The whole thing came down to a lab result. After the two men had been talking for a while, Prince Laurent suggested they settle the question for good. Vandenkerckhove told a Belgian broadcaster that they walked into a hospital side by side, and the prince offered to go first so his son would feel calmer about it.
He says the email came back with a 99.5% DNA match. That number is what turned years of rumor and family talk into a legal fact. Prince Laurent had already acknowledged him publicly last year, but the paperwork before a civil registrar in February is what actually created the title.
Prince Laurent kept his statement short and firm. “With this announcement, I acknowledge that I am the biological father of Clément Vandenkerckhove. We have spoken openly and honestly about this in recent years,” he said. He asked people to treat the matter with discretion and said he would not comment further.
A title with no money and no crown
Here is where the fairy-tale version falls apart. Vandenkerckhove gets no royal allowance, no public funds, and no place representing the Belgian royal house. A law of 27 November 2013 restricted royal endowments to the heir to the throne, an abdicated king or queen, and their surviving spouses. Prince Laurent and Princess Astrid keep theirs only under transitional provisions, King Albert II draws a separate lifetime endowment, and the reigning King is funded by the Civil List. A new prince is on his own.
He also stays out of the line of succession, unlike his three younger half-siblings on his father’s side. Princess Louise is 22, and the twins Prince Nicolas and Prince Aymeric, born a minute apart in that order, round out Prince Laurent’s family with Princess Claire. Those three carry the succession rights. Vandenkerckhove carries a title and an inheritance claim.
That inheritance part is not nothing. Soir Mag, the Belgian weekly that first reported the recognition, said the legal change entitles him to an equal share of his father’s estate alongside the other children. Vandenkerckhove told the outlet he did not care much for the legal technicalities. He cared about the chance to know his father.
The sentence his mother dropped when he was 16
For the first 16 years of his life, he had no idea who his father was. Then his mother decided he was entitled to the truth and told him the whole story. That conversation, between a pop singer and her teenage son, is the whole origin of the story.
Knowing the answer turned out to be its own kind of weight. He said he understood exactly who his father was but was not allowed to tell a soul. “My whole childhood I struggled with the question, who is my father? When I knew, the secrecy weighed heavily on me,” he told a Belgian newspaper. “Imagine: you know who your father is, but you aren’t allowed to tell anyone.”
He went into car sales after school and, by his own account, was good at it. The secret still followed him around. He described panic attacks that were “destroying me,” and said the anxiety only eased once he built an actual relationship with his father. “What matters most to me right now is that I am a son who is allowed to get to know his father,” he said.
There is a strange detail buried in the timeline. He said he actually crossed paths with Prince Laurent in a shopping center back in 2013, before he had any clue who the man was. He was around 20 when he finally worked up the nerve to call. A few more phone calls followed, then a meeting in person, then the trip to the lab.
The name he doesn’t want to give up
Legal recognition also gives him the right to apply for his father’s surname, de Saxe-Cobourg. He could drop Vandenkerckhove and take the same surname the rest of the royals use. He is not sold on it.
“I could do that, but I am proud of the name Vandenkerckhove,” he told a Belgian paper. He put it in blunt terms: giving up his mother’s name would be a betrayal of everything she did for him over the years. For now the newest member of Belgian royalty is keeping the name he grew up with.
His feelings about fatherhood run in two directions, and he made that public. On Belgian Father’s Day, June 14, he posted a photograph of himself with Prince Laurent. The caption made room for a second father too: Frans Vancoppenolle, his mother’s partner, who helped raise him from the age of seven. He captioned it a thank-you to “two fathers who each play an important role in my life in their own way.”
His father’s family has done this before
A prince taking a DNA test to confirm a secret child is not new territory for this family. Prince Laurent’s own father, former King Albert II, spent decades brushing off speculation that he had fathered a daughter out of wedlock.
A Belgian appeals court ordered Albert to take a DNA test in November 2018. He complied in May 2019 only under a penalty of 5,000 euros a day, and in January 2020 accepted paternity. In October 2020 the Brussels Court of Appeal recognised the artist Delphine Boël as Princess Delphine. Albert had abdicated in July 2013, citing his age and health. Delphine became a princess through that fight, which she waged in court for years.
So Vandenkerckhove now shares something specific with an aunt: both of them are royals confirmed by a lab, not a birth announcement. The difference is that his recognition happened without a public legal battle, while hers took years of litigation against a father who fought her. Prince Laurent volunteered to go first at the hospital.
Cars, a documentary, and the girlfriend who had no idea
The two spent time together in the years before the recognition, and that helped them get comfortable with each other after years of distance.
Belgians already knew his face before the title. He appeared in a Flemish TV documentary that aired in September 2025, built entirely around his search for his father and his royal roots. In it he walked viewers through learning the truth at 16 and reaching out to the prince a few years later.
His personal life stayed grounded through all of it. He is with Guadalupe Borrero Ferreira, a Venezuelan-born partner who goes by Lupe.
She had no idea who she was dating. She told Het Nieuwsblad that when they fell in love she did not know his mother was a famous singer, let alone that Clément was the son of a prince.”
Prince Laurent has kept a low public profile through the whole affair, appearing at Belgium’s National Day events on July 21 and saying nothing publicly about the February recognition beyond his 2025 statement acknowledging paternity. His new son seems fine with that pace. He waited more than a decade to say the words out loud, and now, at 26, he finally can.
