Simon Hunter
Businessman Íñigo Onieva was spotted in a video kissing another woman, prompting online detectives to investigate the circumstances
PRODUCERS of Spain’s many gossip TV shows and magazines must have been gleefully rubbing their hands this weekend, as one of the biggest celebrity scandals of recent times played out before their very eyes on social media.
The main protagonist of this very public affair was Tamara Falcó, who is the Sixth Marchioness of Griñón, and thus an aristocrat, as well as a television personality – Netflix recently released a reality show based on her life titled “Lady Tamara”.
Just last week Falcó, 40, publicly announced that she was engaged to Íñigo Onieva, a designer and businessman with interests in nightlife ventures, and with whom she has been involved romantically for two years. The announcement was made on September 22 via Falcó’s Instagram account, via which she said that she was “the luckiest woman in the world” thanks to her relationship.
But by the weekend that apparently idyllic picture was starting to fall apart. Just a day later, a video began to circulate on social media apparently showing Onieva kissing another woman at a music festival. The businessman was forced to make a statement in which he claimed the images were from 2019, “before we met each other”. “I am crazy in love with Tamara and we are going to get married no matter what anyone says,” he told reporters.
By Saturday, however, Falcó had deleted the Instagram image that she had published to announce the engagement, and both online and TV detectives were poring over the brief image of Onieva kissing the woman to see if he was telling the truth.
Firstly they identified the woman he was kissing, who is a fashion model who lives in New York and who published a series of photos from her time at the Burning Man festival in the US state of Nevada, just a few weeks ago. In one of her videos, Onieva is present.
What’s more, none of Onieva’s previous social media posts showed him wearing the same clothes as he had on in the incriminating video. And a Telecinco show, Ya es verano, even went so far as to identify the song playing in the background of the video – which wasn’t released until April of this year.
In the end Onieva was forced to confess and published an Instagram story on Sunday in which he lamented his “unacceptable attitude” and apologised to Falcó and her family (she is the daughter of now-deceased aristocrat Carlos Falco and Filipina socialite Isabel Preysler).
He also called for the images to no longer be shared or broadcast, and that “no more information that is affecting our privacy be published”.
Given the interest the story has generated not just online but also in Spain’s gossip press, that request is likely to be easier said than done.
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