Ernst of Hannover’s moods as a night owl seem to be a thing of the past. The Guelph prince has once again chosen the waters of Ibiza to spend a few days off with his girlfriend, Claudia Stilianopoulos, daughter of Pitita Ridruejo. It was precisely on the Pitiusa island where the couple met almost two years ago, when Carolina de Monaco’s still husband was coming back after his worst days of untamed excesses.
The prince, who has started a new life in Madrid as a result of this relationship, and the artist fled the capital to spend a few days off aboard a yacht with several friends. Although he is still quite thin – he weighed 43 kilos and 1.82 meters tall in his messy times – it seems that he has found stability with Stilianopoulos. In Madrid he also has the company of one of his sons, Christian, his wife, Alessandra de Osma, and the couple’s twins, Nicolás and SofÃa (7). They are one of the few relatives with whom Ernesto has been seen in recent years.
Little has come out about the couple’s activities on the island, perhaps because the prince is now seeking peace in Ibiza and so far he has not waged any more war. Before meeting Pitita’s daughter, Ernesto had some really difficult years. Last summer he lost the legal battle against his eldest son, Ernst August, with whom he was suing to return the assets that he donated to him in life. But it was other types of struggles that made him hit rock bottom.
During the early hours of July 15, 2020, he was arrested and admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Austria for attempting to assault two police officers with a knife sharpener. A few days later he was arrested again for trying to settle scores with the agents armed with a baseball bat. And since there are not two without three, he was arrested on a third occasion for threats to the couple of employees who work for him in his cabin in Austria. Everything led to a ten-month suspended prison sentence, on the condition of not drinking alcohol and not residing for a while in that Austrian residence.
After these incidents, by way of rehabilitation, he spent a few days in a wellness hotel, the well-known Vivamayr in Austria, and then changed Upper Austria for the sun of Ibiza, where he met Claudia a year later. After months of walks and private life together, it was last November when the couple strengthened their relationship in their first appearance together, on the anniversary of Alduccio, an Italian restaurant near the Santiago Bernabeu.
Since his wedding to the princess in 1999, Hannover has had to deal with bad press over numerous scandals. Before meeting the Monegasque princess, the prince went unnoticed, but her fame turned her revelry and fights into European talk, and she did not take it well.
He has almost always offered politically correct versions of what happened when it was public good that they were lurid incidents. In the last interview that he gave to RTL while he was admitted to the clinic, he said that the press has it in for it, but perhaps those excuses would have gotten through if it weren’t for the fact that he has chained one controversy to another for more than two decades.
In 2000, he beat up the owner of a nightclub and has a long history of mysterious ailments, such as when in 2004 Carolina had to attend the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid alone for the wedding of then-Prince Felipe with Letizia Ortiz, while Hannover rested the glasses from the night before.