Conservative Polish presidential candidate denies claims of procuring prostitutes

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Conservative presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki has announced that he will sue a leading news website that today published claims he helped procure prostitutes for clients at a luxury hotel where he once worked as a security guard.

The report was published just six days before Nawrocki, who is supported by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, faces off in a decisive second-round run-off vote for the presidency against Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of the centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s main ruling party.

The website in question, Onet, stands by its reporting, which is based on accounts provided by people who say they worked with Nawrocki at the time of the incidents in question. They have refused to be named but have reportedly given written statements and expressed willingness to testify in court if required.

Onet’s journalists say they have spent months speaking to dozens of people who worked alongside Nawrocki at the five-star Grand Hotel in Sopot, were local police officers, part of the local criminal underworld, or otherwise knew Nawrocki.

Two of them, whose credibility Onet says it has verified, worked with Nawrocki in security at the hotel and both claim he was involved in bringing prostitutes to the hotel.

One said that Nawrocki had offered him the chance to “earn some extra money…by providing prostitutes to hotel guests”. The other says he saw Nawrocki “entering the hotel with a prostitute and her ‘guardian'” before heading to a guest’s room.

Nawrocki, who has never previously stood for elected office, has throughout the campaign been the subject of reports and rumours concerning alleged links to criminals, football hooligans and even neo-Nazis in his younger days, before later becoming a historian and museum director.

As far back as November, before Nawrocki had even been officially named by PiS as the candidate it was supporting, Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading liberal newspaper, published claims by an unnamed former colleague of Nawrocki that he had “arranged women” for hotel guests.

The issue was even referred to by Prime Minister Donald Tusk earlier this month, when he said that PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński had chosen to support Nawrocki despite “knowing everything” about him, including “the connections with gangsters” and “arranging of girls”.

Nawrocki has, however, denied such claims. In response to today’s reports, he announced that, “for this bunch of lies and hatred, I will sue Onet in civil proceedings for the protection of personal rights and I will also file a private indictment in criminal proceedings”.

Referring to the fact that Onet is owned by Swiss-German media conglomerate Ringier Axel Springer, Nawrocki added: “Today in Poland, the problem is political prostitution that wants to give Poland away for foreign money…The media assistants of Tusk and Trzaskowski will not take away our victory.”

PiS has regularly accused Tusk and his PO party of representing German, rather than Polish, interests. During the election campaign, Nawrocki has pointed to German funding that Trzaskowski has received for events he organised.

However, one of the Onet journalists behind today’s report, Jacek Harłukowicz, said that he has written statements from his interlocutors declaring that, if Nawrocki decides to sue, they are willing to repeat their claims under oath in court.

Opinion polls indicate that Sunday’s election will be extremely close between the two candidates, who were separated by less than two percentage points in the first round, with Trzaskowski on 31.36% and Nawrocki on 29.54%.

One of the arguments Trzaskowski has used in his campaign is that, whereas he has served as an elected politician for 16 years and has been thoroughly vetted in that time, Nawrocki is an unknown quantity and that new claims about his past keep emerging.

Earlier this month, after Nawrocki claimed during a TV debate to own only one apartment, reporting by Onet revealed he actually owned a second. Further investigations by other media outlets also raised questions over how he had come to possess the apartment and how he had treated the elderly, disabled man living there.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Jakub Orzechowski / Agencja wyborcza.pl

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.