Lily Becker
This is how son Amadeus deals with his father’s prison sentence
© Michael Gottschalk / Picture Alliance
Lilly Becker only told her son Amadeus about his father’s imprisonment after the verdict. Now Boris Becker’s wife describes how the 12-year-old deals with the difficult situation.
Boris Becker, 54, was sentenced to two years and six months in prison without parole on April 29, 2022 for delaying bankruptcy. Immediately after the verdict, the tennis legend was taken to a London prison.
His wife Lilly Becker, 45, kept the process and the associated headlines away from their son Amadeus, 12, for as long as possible. But after the verdict, this was no longer possible, she had to tell him. The model reported this at the beginning of May. Now the 45-year-old speaks again about what she says is the “worst” moment of her life.
Lilly Becker: Amadeus was “stunned”
In an interview with “Daily Mail”, Lilly Becker emphasizes that “nobody” expected Boris Becker to be sentenced to prison. “So why would I want my child to even know about the process?” she wonders. When the unexpected finally happened, Lilly thought long and hard about how to break the news to her son. “My instinct told me to say it like it is: ‘Your father is in prison. He screwed up.’ But you can’t say that to a 12-year-old child,” she recalls.
That’s why she told her son together with a friend who is a teacher: “I will never forget how I looked into his blue eyes – as blue as Boris’s – and how they moved from left to right and back again. He was stunned. He just couldn’t understand.” A day earlier, Amadeus was still spending time with his father, which is why the 12-year-old kept saying, “But I just saw him.”
This is how Amadeus is doing today
“Telling our son that his father is in prison is the worst thing I’ve ever had to do,” says Lilly Becker. She also thinks it’s “unfair” that her husband put her in this situation, but it’s not fair to Amadeus in particular. In the meantime, however, the 12-year-old has recovered from the shock: “Amadeus is doing better now. He asks questions like ‘What will dad eat?’ or ‘Will he be able to watch movies?'”
The difficult situation also produced something positive: her son had “become her best friend”. “We help each other,” she explains. Lilly also reveals that Amadeus already has a girlfriend whom he has known since kindergarten. “Mom, I will hold doors for you. I will treat you like a queen,” Amadeus told her. Lilly adds that while Amadeus looks a lot like his father, he’s not like him in character: “Amadeus grew up around women for most of his life and he’ll respect women, I’ll make sure of that.”
Source used: dailymail.co.uk