Haijby affair

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Haijby affair was a political affair in Sweden in the 1950s, involving the conviction and imprisonment of Kurt Haijby, a small thief and convicted murderer^{[citation needed]} who had been blackmailing the royal court.

[edit] Background

Haijby was born in 1897 as Kurt Johansson. In 1912 he and another boy scout were granted an audience with king Gustaf V. When Johansson grew older he lived a life in crime and was convicted several times for theft and fraud. While trying to escape prison he shot a police officer dead. After being released he changed his name and tried to open a restaurant. As he was a convicted criminal he could not get a licence to sell liquor. He then applied to the king and was granted a second audience in 1932 to put forward his case. This did not help. Instead Haijby started blackmailing the royal court, claiming that he had been seduced by the king in 1912 and that they had resumed a sexual relationship in 1932.

Haijby claimed that he had been a lover of the king in the years between 1936 and 1947. The court paid Haijby 170.000 Swedish kronor for his silence. However, in 1938 Haijby was arrested for pedophilia and put in custody at the asylum of Beckomberga. The royal court then approached him and offered 400 kronor a month if he left the country and kept quiet about his accusations. Haijby accepted the deal.

Breaching the agreement, Haijby returned to Sweden in 1940 and in 1947 published a roman à clef. The entire first printing was then bought by the court and destroyed. But the coverup effort proved to be in vain. The novel was reprinted and distributed twice, in 1952 and 1979.

Haijby was pronounced insane and sent to an asylum.

In the meantime, another scandal, the Kejne affair, had broken in the press where Vilhelm Moberg was busy writing lengthy articles about homosexual conspiracies among the Swedish officials.

[edit] The affair

Haijby reported his forced detention in the asylum at Beckomberga to the Attorney General of Sweden. These papers were smuggled out of the Attorney General's office by Vilhelm Moberg, and the whole affair thus came to public attention. The actions of officials to suppress the claims caused acrimonious debate in parliament and the media. As a consequence, the court was forced to charge Haijby for acts of blackmail.

In 1952 Haijby was sentenced to eight years hard labor for blackmail, which in 1953 was lowered to six years by a court of appeals. Haijby committed suicide in 1965.

Haijby had reported the treatment he had received to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice. The results of the investigations, the bulk of which were classified until 1981, acquitted to Royalty. It did state that it was not impossible for the incident to have taken place, but that it could not have occurred in the way described by Haijby — at none of the two audiences was Haijby ever alone with the king, and the other boy scout stated that nothing strange happened at the audience in 1912.

However, the fact that the Swedish court was prepared to pay Haijby such large sums to suppress his accusations has by some been taken as evidence that they were either fundamentally true, or if not, that they were suppressed so as not to expose rumors of Gustaf V's homosexuality.