‘Yes, Yvonne was a guilty pleasure’

Heleen van Royen has been very opposed to Yvonne Coldeweijer lately. Sincere or a PR vehicle to market her book? “You said it first guilty pleasure used to be…”

© NPO

Heleen has written an entire novel about juice and it is very ostentatiously based on Yvonne Coldeweijer. At one point her fake Yvonne even lies dead under a balcony. At the book presentation she stood side by side with Rachel Hazes and Samantha Steenwijk, like a kind of Charlie’s Angels fighting the evil juice monster.

Guilty pleasure

Yet Heleen’s attitude is a bit strange, perhaps even somewhat schizophrenic. A year and a half ago she shouted in the media that Yvonne’s juice channel was such a terrible one guilty pleasure it’s for her. And that was at a time when the juice about André Hazes Jr. and Marco Borsato was sloshing against the skirting boards and Yvonne was more ruthless than now.

Isn’t that a bit strange? Time for MAX presenter Sybrand Niessen seems to think so and confronts the writer about it in the yesterday’s broadcast. “I also understand that it used to be one of your guilty pleasures, right?”

Reluctantly

Heleen prefers not to be reminded of those statements in the Beau Monde and reluctantly admits it. “Yes, that was a really long time ago. When it first came into existence I thought: oh, what is this? Oh, quite brutal. Oh, what are they doing? Crazy.”

Martine van Os: “Spies are being deployed. Yes.”

Heleen: “But soon, when I really looked into it, I thought: well, this is not a guilty pleasure at all.”

‘Really bad’

Now Heleen no longer follows Yvonne’s juice channel, she says. “I have to say: I am now also happy that I no longer have to follow them because the book is finished, because it really made me sick. If you really get into it, it will make you feel bad, because people are treated in a very nasty way.”

She continues: “The people who spread that gossip, those spies, that’s also terrible. That you think: why are you doing that? It also makes people very lonely, because who can you trust? And that also applies to such a secondary school. If you can’t trust your fellow students…

Stepmother

Heleen is referring to the fact that secondary schools are currently plagued by gossip channels on TikTok. “If there is an abuse, if a teacher assaults someone, there are channels for that. Then you have to file a declaration and then you really don’t have to go to a juice channel. It is not necessary.”

Although those channels are based on the drama series Gossip Girl and not on Life of Yvonne, Heleen on X does make that link. Silly, Yvonne thinks: “You’re starting to look a bit like the jealous stepmother, Helena.”

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