Celebrity
Freddie Mercury’s Alleged Daughter Steps Forward, Claims To Be Queen Icon’s Secret Child
A shocking new biography of Freddie Mercury, the legendary leader of Queen, is about to shock the entertainment industry by exposing the existence of a secret daughter.
A child who was unintentionally produced following a liaison with a close friend’s wife in 1976—a year after Bohemian Rhapsody became popular—is the subject of the novel Love, Freddie.
Only Mercury’s closest friends and family—his parents, sister, the other band members, and his true love, Mary Austin—were aware of her existence.
The daughter, now 48, who lives in Europe and works as a doctor and mother, making Freddie a posthumous grandfather, has come forward to share her story with renowned rock biographer Lesley-Ann Jones. They all preserved Freddie’s final secret.
Despite growing up in a loving household, she was always aware that her biological father was Mercury, a frequent visitor. He left her 17 volumes of in-depth personal journals, which she kept a secret, before he passed away in 1991 from bronchial pneumonia brought on by Aids.
These are the foundation for the new book that will be released in September, and she has now given them to Jones, who has already written three biographies of the artist.
The novel narrates the tale of a child who was unintentionally conceived in 1976 during a liaison with a close friend’s wife.
The singer’s millions of fans, who have always loved and accepted him as a gay guy, would be extremely shocked by the announcement.
Many have written books about their encounters with him, including Jim Hutton, his late final boyfriend.
However, no one has ever proposed the idea of a secret love kid up to this point.
Long before he became a household name, Freddie Austin was a renowned showman who was well-known for his flamboyance, wit, and four-octave vocal range. He had several full relationships with women, including Mary Austin, whom he met when she was 19 and he was 24.
Before Freddie came out as gay, the couple lived together and were engaged for a period. Although Mary had two kids with another spouse and stayed close to Freddie throughout his life, they never had children.
Another later romance with Austrian actress Barbara Valentin occurred in the early 1980s.
This third liaison with a woman – the mother of his love child – was, however, something Freddie kept a closely guarded secret. The woman is understood to have died years ago. In chapter one of the book, there is a handwritten letter from Freddie’s daughter – known only as ‘B’ – in which she says, ‘Freddie Mercury was and is my father. We had a very close and loving relationship from the moment I was born and throughout the final 15 years of his life.
‘He adored me and was devoted to me. The circumstances of my birth may seem, by most people’s standards, unusual and even outrageous. That should come as no surprise. It never detracted from his commitment to love and look after me. He cherished me like a treasured possession.’
When ‘B’ first approached Jones three years ago, Jones, who has already published books on David Bowie, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones, was immediately sceptical of her sincerity.
“My instinct was to doubt everything, but I am absolutely sure she is not a fantasist,” she says. “No one could have faked all this. Why would she have worked with me for three-and-a half years, never demanding anything?”
“In my experience of fantasists, and I’ve met a few, they seek instant gratification, publicity and reward. She has never asked for money. She does not want recognition. Both Freddie and her stepfather left her extremely wealthy. She was not provided for through Freddie’s will, but by a private, legal arrangement, so no one will find her mentioned there.”
The author is convinced that ‘B’ is true to her word: “Freddie Mercury was not who you think he was. He took his greatest secret to the grave,” she says. “He was a hands-on, devoted dad. He described fatherhood as the fulfilment of his most cherished ambition and as the greatest blessing of his life.”
She adds, “His only child was conceived accidentally with the wife of one of his closest friends, while his friend was away on an extended business trip. For the Roman Catholic mother, abortion was out of the question.”
“It was decided between the three adults that the child would live with her mother and her husband – the child’s stepfather. Freddie would have his own rooms at each of their homes. The three close friends would raise the child together. Freddie visited and stayed with them frequently. He spoke to his daughter every day when he was away on tour or in the recording studio.”
“She knew from toddlerhood which of the two men was her real father. Outside the unusual family, privacy and discretion were maintained to a degree that not even some members of Freddie’s personal household had any idea that he had a child.”
When Freddie first found out about the pregnancy in 1976, he began writing the diaries. The 192 pages of each book are penned in ballpoint or rollerball pens, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in blue, and sometimes in black ink. In them, he documents his remarkable journey, beginning in 1946 in Zanzibar, where he was born Farrokh Bulsara to Parsi-Indian parents.
They also detail how the family fled Zanzibar during the 1964 revolution and settled in Middlesex, as well as how he attended a British-style boarding school in India from the age of eight to sixteen.
On Sunday, June 20, 1976, two days after Queen’s song, “You’re My Best Friend,” which was written by bassist John Deacon and featured on their 1975 album A Night at the Opera, was released, Freddie penned his first entry in the original notebook.
The band was getting ready for a brief tour of the United Kingdom that September, which would include their most significant performance to date on September 18 at Hyde Park. On Wednesday, July 31, 1991, as his health deteriorated, he made his last entry in the last notebook.
“At a conservative estimate, Freddie wrote around 555,000 words in total in just under 15 years,” says Jones. Shortly before his death, on November 24 1991, he entrusted the collection of 17 volumes to his then 15-year-old daughter.
Only her nanny, mother, stepfather and Mary Austin knew that he had gifted them to her. “He instructed her not to read the more graphic journals, eye-wateringly frank about his reckless lifestyle, until she reached her 25th birthday,” says Jones. “She has stated that if anyone else tries to claim ownership of the diaries, she will burn them.”
Upon initially agreeing to see B in 2022, Jones was further persuaded of her identity by the remarkable abundance of new and reliable material found in the journals.
They first met in Montreux, Switzerland, which is not ‘B”s hometown but was picked as a ‘Freddie-centric’ place because Mercury lived there for a long time, produced a number of albums there, and a bronze statue of him can be seen on the lakeside promenade as a memorial.
At first Jones had no idea whom she was meeting – or the bombshell that was about to drop. “She did not sell herself to me as Freddie’s daughter. She did not even identify herself when she first contacted me.”
“Having read my book, Love Of My Life [the Mercury biography Jones wrote in 2021], she emailed to thank me for it, but told me there were still many things I should know.”
“She had assumed I could simply add new material to the existing book, and publish an updated edition. I explained that publishing doesn’t work like that.”
“She was not at all keen to begin with on me writing a new book – her concern all along has been privacy, which is of utmost importance to her.”
“I spent weeks trying to guess her identity, and eventually worked it out. She admitted to it only when I put it to her. We agreed to work together, and I went to Montreux to meet her.”
In order to provide evidence that she was who she said she was, “B” brought the diaries to the meeting along with additional items such pictures, cards, notes, and bank statements. But for her, seclusion was essential. As promised, Jones is so concerned about her identity being revealed that she won’t even provide a physical description of the woman.
“She wants her family’s life to remain just as it is,” she says. “She will be spending the summer in a far-flung location, to avoid both publicity for the book and any attempts to find her.”
‘B’ provides another justification for revealing Freddie’s journals after 30 years in a different letter that is part of the book.
“After more than three decades of lies, speculation and distortion, it is time to let Freddie speak,” she says. “Those who have been aware of my existence kept his greatest secret out of loyalty to Freddie. That I choose to reveal myself in my own midlife is my decision and mine alone. I have not, at any point, been coerced into doing this.”
He gave me, his only child, and his next of kin his collection of private notebooks, which had the written documentation of his innermost feelings, recollections, and ideas about everything he had gone through.
“He entrusted his collection of private notebooks to me, his only child and his next of kin, the written record of his private thoughts, memories and feelings about everything he had experienced.”
“His gift to me was our secret. Although those who lived with him and shared his life knew of the existence of the notebooks, none of them knew, after his death, what had become of them.”
“Mary Austin – the wonderful woman who was to all intents and purposes his wife until death parted them – knew absolutely everything about him, including all his undisclosed secrets.”
“Everyone else . . . they knew only what Freddie wanted them to know. Which wasn’t much.”
“Freddie was an intensely private man. He gave so few interviews that he was famous for it.”
This made it easier for people to ‘exploit and betray him’ after his death, claims B.
“Their versions of Freddie are far removed from the man he really was. They have done this for their own profit and ego. Freddie would have been deeply wounded by it all.”
“I had read everything that Lesley-Ann Jones had ever written about my father when I wrote to her towards the end of 2021, with the intention of offering her the responsibility of sharing his true story.”
“I had been meaning to contact her for years, having read so much of her work: not only about Freddie, but also about other artists. I was struck by her obvious pursuit of the truth, and by how closely she came to capturing the real Freddie.”
“Her book portrayed him more accurately than anything I had ever read. So much of what has been written and committed to film about him by so-called friends, lovers, employees and colleagues has been at best a gross distortion of the truth, at worst an exercise in exploitation.”
Thus, for several months starting in late 2021, the two women had a heated conversation.I’m still in contact with Lesley-Ann nowadays. Our lengthy conversations have been incredibly poignant, painful, and sometimes intolerable.
“I revealed to her who my father was. I told her the truth about his childhood, his life, and everything that built the infant, the boy, the teenager, the young man, the grown man, the dad he was to me, the stage persona and the Mercury mask that he created. I explained to her how he compartmentalised his life, and of course talked at length about our precious time together.”
“The life I live with my husband and our family in another country is intensely private. We want things to stay that way. We cherish our peaceful and anonymous life, and we want nothing to disturb it. Nobody needs to know who I am.”
“I will have nothing more to say beyond what I have revealed in this book. There will be no further interviews other than those that I have given to Lesley-Ann. I owe it to my father to cherish privacy as one of the most precious privileges in life.”
“As he himself said, it was the thing he regretted giving away so readily. The one thing he wished that he could get back.”
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