Royal Screw Job

A judge on the Spanish National court has decreed that all copies of a popular magazined be confiscated, and has brought charges against the magazine's publishers, due to a cartoon that alleges to have insulted the royal family.

Judge Juan Del Olmo ordered police to round up copies of El Jueves, whose front page carried a drawing of Crown Prince Felipe having sex with his wife and commenting on a government plan to give parents 2,500 € for each child born. In his writ, del Olmo stated that the cartoon is “clearly denigrating and objectively slanderous.”

Spanish media almost uniformly derided the judge's decision to pull the issue, saying it trampled freedom of expression in a first-world democracy.

"Just imagine if you end up pregnant," the cartoon Felipe says to his wife, Letizia, who is bent over on the bed in front of him. "This will be the closest thing to work I've ever done in my life."

Under Spanish law, the heads of El Jueves magazine face a prison term of between six months and two years if found guilty of slander against the Crown, as set out in two articles of the Penal Code.

“Our goal was to poke fun at Zapatero’s campaign promise — there was no other motive,” said El Jueves co-publisher José Luis Martín. The cartoonist, Guillermo, said that the court decision is “a real blunder” that will not favor the Crown, because now “the drawing will show up everywhere.” Guillermo, went on to claim that the couple shown is not in fact Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia, but Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.