Ten years ago, Tim Hofman had dinner with Linda de Mol and her controversial lover Jeroen Rietbergen, he remembers in the Voice retrospective special of BOOS. “Yes, no, I didn’t remember that.”
A striking anecdote that has never been discussed before: Linda de Mol and Jeroen Rietbergen had dinner ten years ago, in 2016, with the man who cornered them in a spectacular way. Tim Hofman, who they undoubtedly see as their tease, went to a restaurant with the two after his photo shoot for l’HOMO.
Plight
Linda and Jeroen could not have imagined that Tim would seriously damage her reputation and destroy his career. Through that personal contact, Linda also hoped to be able to influence Tim before the infamous Voice special of his program BOOS came online. “I thought that was quite a dire situation.”
What do you mean? Tim explains it in his retrospective special: “Because… Knowing is a big word, but I met Linda regularly. For example, I did the cover of l’HOMO in 2016. That is from Linda. I did a few more things for that magazine at the time, such as photo shoots for LINDA. and LINDA.meiden, etc..”
Eating with Jeroentje
Tim has also been a columnist for LINDA.meiden. “After that l’HOMO photo shoot, I had dinner with Linda and — I only realized this this morning — with Jeroen Rietbergen.”
His sidekick is terrified. Tim: “Yes… No, I didn’t remember that. He was of course a well-known man in a certain segment. Not to me at the time. What I’m trying to say: I once participated in Ik Hou Van Holland. I met Linda once and it was friendly, but I can’t let that cloud a journalistic story.”
Shitty situation
What did Tim answer to Linda? “I then had to say: ‘It’s a terrible situation, but I’m not going to call you off the record, I can’t do that. My job requires that from me and I take that very seriously and that now takes precedence over our pleasant media relationship.’”
Then Linda came with another text. “Yes, and that was actually a bit in line with what Jeroen sent earlier. The first text was: ‘Can we call?’, so I said: ‘I don’t do anything off the record.’ And yet she sends an unsolicited, what she calls, confidential message. That’s complicated.”
Confidential
Tim doesn’t think it’s confidential. “She thinks: it is confidential because I say so, but it doesn’t actually work that way. What I told her then was: ‘We are not including that message from you on the broadcast this time’, but we now have that message and I am not going to read it in full, but the gist is very interesting and relevant.”
He continues: “It is actually a way to try to put pressure on our broadcast. On the content of the broadcast. What she starts talking about, for example, is the content of the app messages that Jeroen sent to the young women within The Voice of Holland, that we had to place them in the right context.”
Context
Striking: Linda shouted on stage that she had ended her relationship with Jeroen, but backstage she was still concerned with his – and therefore her – reputation. “Then you think: yes, it is right that someone says that, but first of all: of course we do that. That is our job. But the most important thing is that the context in that sense makes virtually no difference.”
He continues: “The context is and remains: a powerful man within The Voice of Holland, the band leader, sends unwanted sexually explicit messages, which go as far as dick pics, to young women with less power than him. That is the only context you need to know.”
Legal action
At the end of the message, Linda hints that she may take legal action if an off-the-record conversation cannot take place. Sneaky.
Tim: “Yes, it is fascinating. And the bottom line is that the responsibility now fell to us, according to them, but it lay with Jeroen all those years.”
