I still don’t get the Veronique story, btw. Just found a lot of photo pages on google.be and beyond. [Radio Free Blogistan‘s Christian, in his comment to my recent entry in English]

Veronique De Kock is a 24 year old model, former Miss Belgium (1995), sometime singer and TV presenter, organiser of Miss Antwerp beauty pageants and a nice person altogether. Easy on the eyes, too.

She has nice breasts. There’s a rumour going around that she has implants. She denies the rumour. End of story, right?

Well, in a word: no. There has been an escalation these past few months of ever more insistent cries that she has had her breasts enhanced, and ever more categorical denials that she did nothing of the sort.

Things came to a head (so to speak) when Veronique decided to have her breasts x-rayed, had the photos published in P-Magazine (where she’s had many a swimsuit special over the years, by the way (down boy!)).

She thought she’d put the nasty rumour to bed when the x-rays looked nothing like, say, Lolo Ferrari’s monstrosities.

And then she appeared on De Laatste Show, a Flemish late-night talk show. The host, Bruno Wyndaele, a smug bastard if ever there was one, had the most irritating interview with her. On or off TV, the most condescending conversation I ever saw. The kind of situation where whatever you say or do, the other person goes “suuuuuuure” with an amused smile, and clearly doesn’t believe a word you say.

The worst thing about a situation like that is you can’t do anything about it. No matter what Veronique said, Wyndaele kept going on about x-rays not proving anything, and that she certainly had something to hide, and that she shouldn’t be ashamed to confess to having plastic surgery, and that if they were saline implants they wouldn’t show up on the x-rays, and that she couldn’t really prove those x-rays were of her chest anyway, etc. etc.

No to put too fine a point on it, by the end of the interview Veronique was livid. The very next day she went to a competing TV programme, Mediamadammen, and took the entire crew to a clinic where she had her bosom ultrasounded. The doctor taking the ultrasound exam was formal: there were no implants of any kind in Veronique De Cock breasts, saline or otherwise.

But still the controversy raged on. And then suddenly last week, on Thursday morning 12th of September, photos of Veronique De Kock without bra, naked, in monokini as it were, on the beach at St. Tropez, apparently taken by a paparazzo, appeared on the internet.

By Thursday afternoon the entire Belgian internet world knew about it, and on Friday the papers had the story, radio programmes went on about it, and Veronique herself had started taking legal action against the phtotographer and any sites that hosted the pictures.

And also by then, I was about the only site on the internet in Dutch that rated highly on Google (.be and .com) and that mentioned Vernoique De Kock, St. Tropez, her breasts, the fact that they were naked, and that I had the photos in my posession.

And the hits started rolling in.

So there. That’s why I’m still on top of the most-read blogs at Salon, five days after the De Kock storm started.

Oh yes; in case anyone’s wondering what all the hoopla is about: the pictures can be found (for the moment at least, I don’t know how long his server will be able to take the load) at Dextro’s web site: