The Twisted True Love Story of Lady Betty Grafstein and José Castelo Branco

José Castelo Branco had been wearing the same Balmain leggings for two weeks. Anyone who knows knows this to be a scandal. The spouse of a diamond heiress and a Kardashian-level star in Portugal, José always lived for a certain level of luxury. Traveling from New York to Lisbon for what was supposed to be a short trip, José brought the usual 13 Louis Vuitton suitcases and paid thousands of dollars in excess baggage fees.

But when José and I met up this May in the Portuguese capital, it was in a small apartment on a suburban street, and circumstances did not allow for such standards of presentation. Betty Grafstein, an elderly British aristocrat and José’s wife of nearly 30 years, had accused José of physical and psychological abuse. Portuguese authorities were investigating. The couple’s shared wardrobe and jewelry collection were now the subject of a marital dispute. José was effectively couch surfing at the apartment of a loyal friend and down to a single outfit—the same one José had worn to jail, minus a Birkin bag, sold to help pay legal fees.

José’s problems started a month earlier, on April 20, 2024, when Betty ended up in the hospital after a fall. According to Betty’s statement to doctors treating her for a fractured femur and an injured wrist, José had intentionally pushed her. The hospital made an official complaint to authorities. José was arrested and spent the night in jail. Paparazzi swarmed outside José’s cell window. How was José doing? “Lindamente.” (Beautifully.)

On paper, beauty was the one thing José and Betty always had in common. José (he/she, per the Instagram bio and in this article) is a 61-year-old fashion model turned art dealer who has spent a lifetime breaking rules of gender and race. Meanwhile, Lady Betty Grafstein DBE (also per her bio) is a 95-year-old dame who came of age in a New York where codes of dessert fork placement made one’s standing. And yet when José and Betty met in the early 1990s, it was as if each had found a mirror.

“For me she is everything. My sister, my mother, my wife. We have a complicity, like two souls in one,” José told me.

Betty saw it another way: “My hairdresser told me, Betty, José wants to be you.”

The couple’s life together consisted of galas, afternoons on yachts, designing gold cuff links for a Saudi prince. In New York, where they lived in their exquisitely appointed Upper East Side apartment, José and Betty were never seen without meticulous, often matching, designer ensembles. They shared a closet. They shared Botox doctors. Over time commenters remarked that José and Betty began to look subtly alike.

To their many online fans, the idea that José had abused Betty was unthinkable. Their romance had already survived all manner of scandals—a labor lawsuit brought by a former maid, a shoplifting charge, trouble with the Portuguese tax authority. There had even been a sex tape, leaked in 2011, in which José appeared in an orgy, Betty nowhere in sight. (José claims to have been drugged the night that video was made.)

What if violence had been hidden all along? Commenters speculated about a murder plot to off Betty and run away with her rumored millions—or on the other hand, conspiracies by hangers-on to manipulate Betty and disinherit José. José was released and given an ankle monitor. She went on talk shows. Far from trying to kill Betty, it was only because of José’s hard work as a caretaker that Betty was alive, José argued.

The couple maintained a grueling calendar: dinner parties, galas, fashion shows. Betty traveled to these outings sometimes precariously, in a wheelchair, pushed by someone who was also filming and appeared to be managing her Instagram account.

Betty’s camp was silent. Over the next few weeks, ominous news leaked from the private hospital in the seaside resort of Cascais where she was being treated. Betty was fighting for her life. She had caught pneumonia and was on antibiotics, reports stated. Her only son, Roger Basile, would soon fly from New York to Portugal to be with her. Each new day was a small miracle.

Last fall, back when José’s biggest scandal was being fined for stealing perfume from the Lisbon airport (she maintains her innocence), I discovered the couple on TikTok. Who were this dignified old lady and otherworldly androgynous swan, dressed head to toe in Chanel, madly in love with each other and drinking Champagne on all-night livestreams?

From what I could glean from past coverage, Betty was a British American socialite who had inherited a large fortune from her second husband, the late diamond dealer Albert Grafstein. José was her third spouse, an avant-garde Mozambican reality star. Although they weren’t household names in the US, José and Betty had an entourage of assistants, a wardrobe seemingly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of views on TikTok. And yet their (many) TV appearances were all in Portuguese. Long national stars there, they had emerged suddenly as global icons or as social media stars acting like global icons. And increasingly anyway: What’s the difference?

I emailed José and was promptly invited to an apartment uptown for tea. Their home felt like a maximalist movie set. Monkey sculptures knelt in prayer on gilded pedestals. A living room was decorated with Louis XVI furniture, a collection of Catholic saints, and a male nude in bronze. Lighting was by chandelier. Seating was in leopard. An opera played from hidden speakers.

Ladies never cross their legs, I’d soon learn, among other things. The phrase “bon appétit” was out of style. Louis Vuitton should be used only for its luggage. It was a disaster that the vulgar Kardashians were tastemakers—could I believe that José and Betty were only just now becoming known outside Portugal? Minutes passed or maybe hours, tea never materialized. There were diatribes about nobility, guest lists of long-ago parties dissected.

Decades late to the influencer game, the couple turned to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok when they could no longer travel due to Betty’s health. Botox and arthritis had given Betty a limited range of motion, but she kept a sharp wit. She batted back one José interruption with a single word: “Comma!” Her age was a particular font of bons mots. “You may go before me, you never know,” she told José dryly at one point. “You could be hit by a bike.”

Betty’s age was the subject of much debate in comments sections. The couple maintained a grueling calendar: dinner parties, galas, fashion shows. Betty traveled to these outings sometimes precariously, in a wheelchair, pushed by someone who was also filming and appeared to be managing her Instagram account. Betty had been in the hospital at least three times in the past year.

After one health scare a rumor spread that Betty had died and José was hiding it. A contingent of fans insisted the woman in the videos on Betty’s own account was a wax figure, citing her lineless face. “I am scared of what could possibly happen if she does pass, because her and José are giving very much like the couple where, if you die I’ll kill myself,” speculated one of the hosts of Seeking Derangements, a queer comedy podcast.

The newest TikTok and Instagram followers were young and international. They were curious about José and Betty’s money, their age gap, their performance of femininity. Certainly there were haters too. Whether you were in search of a queer elder or a secret transphobe, sugar-baby curious or an eat-the-rich type, José and Betty had something to intrigue you. In September 2023 designer and Knowles family favorite Luar cast José in a campaign.

New followers quickly became engrossed by the drama of José and Betty’s daily life: That is to say, they were engrossed by the drama of watching the couple age. It was happening against their will, naturally. José, at 61, had the fixed form of a Real Housewife. But Betty, at 95 and getting more stooped, could no longer wear many of the pieces in her collection of jewels, shoes, and gowns.

After a few hours in their apartment, José looked at a watch (Rolex) and jumped. They were late for a critical appointment. We flew up Third Avenue into oncoming traffic. José was pushing Betty in a wheelchair and galloping in stilettos (Dolce). Betty was strapped into her chair with a belt, white-knuckling the chair’s handle. I jogged alongside, tasked with carrying their bags (Chanel and Hermès).

“Should we get out of the street?” I asked, warily eyeing the oncoming taxis a few blocks up.

“You think they will say anything to me? I am José Castelo Branco!” José declared, as if this explained it. I wondered if the expedition was a performance for my benefit. Genuine disorganization also seemed possible.

By the time we reached the office of plastic surgeon Ramtin Kassir on 66th and Park, José was panting. It took us three minutes and one receptionist to get Betty and her chair over the half step at the office door. I took out a camera to film what appeared to be a tense moment but soon felt bad and jumped in to help. When we finally made it into the exam room, José was exhausted and went outside for a cigarette. Betty looked straight at me and got to the point: She preferred not to be jostled around to this extent. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay home and do nothing—she liked seeing people. But José pushed her too far.

José came back into the exam room and pulled out a phone. The tension evaporated; now they were making content.

“Darling, what you doing Betty?” José cooed, holding the camera.

“I’m doing what I’m always doing—my very famous and favorite doctor in the whole world who I love so so much,” Betty responded, smiling, in a warbly Queen’s English.

“And you’re going to have what?” asked José.

“Fil-ler,” Betty responded, enunciating each syllable.

José and Betty met in the early ’90s, after a mutual friend brought the recently widowed Betty to an opening at José’s art gallery in Cascais. At first they were friends. At a party one day, José saw Betty rebuffing a suitor. “I realized she was a real lady, and it created in my subconscious the desire to protect her more. It turned me on,” José said in his native Portuguese to an authorized biographer in 2010.

José, in his early 30s at the time, assumed Betty was in her 50s. Too polite to ask, José found out otherwise a few days before their wedding. José remembers thinking, She’s over 60? Betty soon began to look even younger. Her hair went from red to blond. She lost weight and wrinkles. José changed physically too, embracing androgyny and, eventually, femininity. More recently if you were to see José hosting at the NYC nightclub The Box, in a party photo with Amanda Lepore, or on a runway, you might assume she was a beautiful trans woman. José, who is deeply Catholic and attends Mass every Sunday, prefers not to use such labels: “I’m very well resolved. I’m a she, but in the other side, I’m still a he. Who cares?”

In the Portuguese biography, José describes the decision to embrace both masculinity and femininity as a reaction to a life of hardship. As a naturally androgynous teenager, José suffered bullying, as well as sexual assaults starting at age 11. “I was very traumatized. One day I said to myself: ‘That’s enough, José!’ I was a trailblazer in this country. I paved the way for people to feel free to be themselves.”

José was born in Mozambique in 1962, to a family of African, Portuguese, and Indian descent. An older brother, Sérgio, became a cabinet minister in the nation’s newly independent government. (A second cousin, António Costa, went on to become Portugal’s prime minister, resigning last year.) A young José looked up to his iconoclastic brother, who rebelled against their colonial family. But even the socialist revolutionary Sérgio never accepted his sibling’s style of rule breaking.

José and Betty’s mainstream notoriety began in 2003, when the couple was apprehended at the Lisbon airport with 2 million euros’ worth of undeclared gems. They claimed the 100-some diamond necklaces, bracelets, rings, and watches were for personal use. Soon José and Betty were minor celebrities, with footage of José leaving jail broadcast prime time. (José was eventually acquitted and the state returned the jewels.)

Then reality TV producers called. Celebrity Farm, in 2004, was José’s first show—she won and became easily the most famous cast member, chasing donkeys in designer sunglasses. Later, in First Battalion, José joined the army. In Splash! Celebrities, José appeared in flashy swimsuits and took diving lessons. In Celebrity Circus, José tamed lions. Lost in the Tribe, from 2011, still goes viral. The premise: José is sent to live in the Namibian bush. Much of the storyline revolves around the “tribe” members’ confusion about whether José should integrate with its men or women. It is an extremely cringe, fascinating artifact of 2000s reality TV, and of someone cannily harnessing the spectacle of their own ostracization.

One night in New York, I asked Betty, who calls José “my husband,” for her thoughts on gender. “I never thought of those things,” she said. “I love everybody.” Femininity, according to Betty, was one of José’s many talents: “He can paint, he can sew, he can do so many things! But he’s just his own worst enemy. The way he acts. He’s not put together properly. You accept it after a while. We’ve been married a long time.”

In the months I worked on this story, José had a number of public feuds. There was a fashion designer with whom José canceled a collaboration less than a week before a planned runway show. The designs “would have given Betty a heart attack.” There was a security guard at an Upper East Side physical rehab facility where Betty was being treated who offended the couple by asking them to use a back entrance. José pushed through the front door anyway. Police were called. “Try to make me to go to the back door. Like a common,” José told me. “Never.”

“One of the things I like about him is that he’s a little bit punk,” said José’s friend, stylist David Motta. “He refuses to entirely be a product.” Motta recalled once helping José organize a messy part of the house. Motta discovered his friend had secretly hidden thousands of pairs of false eyelashes. “If the world goes into a big war and I have to fight for myself and Betty, I will look my best,” José explained matter-of-factly.

But something didn’t add up. Why was Lady Betty Grafstein DBE, heiress to the Grafstein diamond fortune, doing sponsored posts for filler injectors at age 95?

Betty was the member of the couple I observed to be more obviously performing. She would muster energy for cameras, going quiet again once they had stopped rolling. She became most animated talking about her past, especially lesser-known anecdotes of hardship.

During World War II, Betty remembers going to school on England’s southern coast as bombs dropped. Betty fell in love with an American GI and moved to New York to marry him. But her first husband was abusive, she said. “He broke my jaw when I found out he had a girlfriend,” Betty told me. She said he was in the Mafia. I was skeptical until I found his RICO conviction from 1991. The couple separated, and Betty went to work at a dentist’s office and at PepsiCo before marrying diamond dealer Albert Grafstein in 1959. She created a jewelry business of her own. A 1969 WWD article described Betty as a “real hidden gem” of a designer, beloved by private clients who shopped for diamond-and-coral mushroom pins and emerald rings in her “sparkling east side apartment.” (Betty said Joan Crawford was among her clientele.)

While a dive into genealogy sites revealed the names of colonial dons and donas among José’s ancestors, Betty said she held more recent titles: According to her Instagram bio, she was a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, or DBE, an honor awarded for “a pre-eminent contribution in any field” in one’s lifetime by the royal family. She was often credited as “Lady,” a hereditary peerage. In old photos the couple shared with me, Betty wears a diamond tiara. She and José told me this was a family heirloom from Betty’s adoptive grandmother in England, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary of Teck. If Betty’s adoptive parents, who took her in as a baby, were genteel, her birth parents were of such importance that Betty would keep their names secret to the grave, the couple told me.

“We don’t want to upset the royal family,” hinted José.

But something didn’t add up. Why was Lady Betty Grafstein DBE, heiress to the Grafstein diamond fortune, doing sponsored posts for filler injectors at age 95? Wasn’t she precisely the kind of woman who didn’t need to bother with indignities such as this?

Sketchy search results placed Betty Grafstein’s net worth between $25 million and $500 million. But I couldn’t find much about the Grafstein Diamond Corporation. The only website I could find mentioning the family business, outside of articles about Betty, was a neighborhood jewelry store in New Jersey that had at one point sold its wares. Meanwhile, I couldn’t find Betty’s name on the registries of knights and dames honored by UK monarchs. When I asked José and Betty for details, the couple told me Betty received her dameship in a ceremony in 2001. They had photos and a medal from the event, they said, but they were in the home in Sintra.

The villa was another puzzle. The 11-bedroom property was in a picturesque medieval town, long the summer residence of Portuguese monarchs. Betty and Albert Grafstein purchased it in the 1970s as a country home. When José came into the picture, the couple hosted lavish summer parties there. More recently, a former friend and fellow reality show contestant, Pedro Pico, whom José and Betty now describe as a “squatter,” was advertising it for rent on Airbnb. Pico, a well-known drag queen in Portugal, had redecorated it with a Pac-Man machine, flat-screen TVs, and a blow-up Jacuzzi. (Pico told me he’s renting legally and denied he’s a squatter.)

But what of the glittering apartment on East 62nd Street? A 2019 New York Supreme Court opinion revealed, to my great surprise, that the apartment that hosted parties attended by Tina Radziwill, interior designer Baron Roger de Cabrol, and Studio 54 promoter Carmen D’Alessio was in fact a rental—and it was rent-stabilized. (The diamond heiress paid less rent than I did!)

I tracked down Betty’s step-grandson, Pierre Cohen, who works in the diamond business in Belgium. “Albert was a normal diamond wholesaler on 47th Street,” Cohen told me of his grandfather’s upper-middle-class background. “And he was not particularly successful given that he lived in Portugal half the year.” When Albert died, Cohen inherited an amount that was more like a gift, he said, and less than what it would have taken to buy a condo.

Was Betty actually an heiress after all? “Have you spoken to Roger?” Cohen asked me. “If Betty had millions, I’m sure Roger would want to know.”

When I was spending time at José and Betty’s apartment this spring, Roger Basile, Betty’s son from her first marriage, would sometimes call. He and José seemed to have cordial, civil conversations about Betty’s care. When I tried to reach him on his mom’s urging, Basile wouldn’t talk to me. Then the news about the domestic violence allegations broke, and he took my call.

“I’ve been silent because this has been happening for years,” Basile told me. “I didn’t want to say things people didn’t already know.”

Basile said he first learned of domestic abuse in the late 1990s. He got a call from friends of Betty’s and flew to Portugal. “When I got there, she was black-and-blue, from her buttocks to her neck, where José knocked her down and kept kicking her on the ground.” Basile said Betty told him José abused her. For many years, Basile said, he tried to extract his mom from what he describes as a violent relationship. “She always took José back.”

José denied ever abusing Betty and said this incident in the late 1990s never happened. When I asked José why Basile would say otherwise, José told me that Basile has always disliked José and has been working for 28 years to break up the marriage for his own financial gain. Basile was also transphobic, said José. “He never believed I was in love, that his mother was in love.”

Basile is 75 and perhaps the only person in the couple’s orbit with no social media account. When his stepfather, Albert Grafstein, died, Basile managed the family diamond business. But he flatly denied that the business was a source of great wealth for his mom, or that there is a succession battle, revealing for the first time, “My mom is penniless!” Betty lives off Social Security, according to Basile. Although once a woman who “lived nicely,” he said, today her only possessions of value are clothes, jewelry, and the home in Sintra, which the couple mortgaged.

According to Basile, much of the story of Lady Betty Grafstein, dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, is a work of fiction authored by José.

“My grandparents were simple people,” Basile said of his mother’s family. “I visited them once at their small house in the country.” Betty’s adoptive father, who the couple said owned the men’s magazine The Yachtsman, was actually a typesetter, according to Basile. Census records confirmed that and also indicated that Betty’s grandfather—the one whose wife was supposedly lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary—was a publican, someone who owned or managed a pub.

Betty’s dameship, in Basile’s recollection, came not from the Queen of England but from an Irish PR adviser and diplomatic consultant named Anthony Bailey. A frequent guest at José and Betty’s parties over the years, Bailey helped revive the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George and the Royal Order of Francis I, a Catholic chivalric order. The society bestowed its own honorifics, such as “Dame,” to individuals including Margaret Thatcher and, in 2001, Betty Grafstein. At first Betty used the order’s letters, “DFO,” after her name. At some point the letters changed ever so slightly.

Per José, it was Bailey who had explicitly told the couple that Betty’s dameship was approved by the Queen of England. “The notion that Mrs. Grafstein’s now lapsed entry into an Italian charitable order in 2001 allowed José to claim 23 years later she was a British dame or lady are clearly the rantings of a deranged fantasist,” Bailey told me. “I am not a liar,” said José. “He’s the liar.”

Basile argued Betty was entirely innocent in any misrepresentation. “My mother never made herself out to be more than she was,” in terms of wealth or titles, Basile said. “José pushed these stories and they became celebrities in Portugal. And she went along with it because she liked the attention.”

José had a history of playing up aristocratic grandeur, going by the nickname “The Count” on reality TV.

But I wondered if Basile’s interpretation—that Betty had no hand in creating the myth of her own titles—may not give Betty enough credit. Many a modern-day princess had christened herself, and in decades worth of media coverage, no one yet had doubted Betty’s titles. Maybe on a certain level, she deserved them. In 2024 the aristocracy is largely made-up anyway—whether by a guy 400 years ago who said God made him king, or by a PR adviser you met at a party.

And plenty of followers had happily bought into the fantasy—myself included. During my time in José’s and Betty’s lives, I had been enchanted by the romance: their elegant disarray, their commitment to nostalgic glamour, their odd combination of old-world manners and American quest for celebrity.

Perhaps the reality was just as fascinating as the myth. If Betty was penniless, it meant José likely hadn’t married her for her millions—or at the very least, didn’t stay by her side for nearly 30 years for them.

When I spoke to José about Betty’s biography, she seemed stunned at what I had uncovered and denied pressuring Betty to make up stories. “Poor Betty,” José said.

José was smoking, hands shaking. “Listen, my dear, you can see the breed of a person. You will not need to put on Chanel. It’s her attitude, her body language, everything. The nobility is inside.”

For months after ending up in the Portuguese hospital, Betty made no public comment. A lawyer visited her at her hospital in Portugal, and rumors of divorce circulated. Finally, leaked photos showed Betty and caregivers traveling by plane from Portugal directly to another hospital in New York.

José stayed in Portugal with a friend. The authorities removed her ankle monitor, and her lawyers are currently fighting a travel ban. In the absence of information from Betty, I wondered about not just the current status of her and José’s relationship, but its fundamental nature.

Cynics may say José and Betty were never in love, just using each other for beauty or status. Perhaps their lifelong performance of fame was a golden cage, a distraction from a toxic dynamic. But it also seemed possible that the artifice was the passion. All romance starts with a dose of delusion: We fall in love with the idea of someone until, over time, our fantasy of the other person either buckles under the strain of reality or carries on forever, eclipsing whatever reality may have once existed.

In June, two months after ending up in the hospital, Betty got in touch through Basile and let me know she wanted to speak with me. She and her son called me on FaceTime from a beige-walled rehab room on the Upper East Side. Betty was wearing blue scrubs and simple beaded bracelets. “If I have any visitors, tell them I’m not here!” she said at one point when the phone rang.

Betty and I spoke for around 40 minutes. At times her memory and energy level flagged. But she was most clear and confident about what she described as her longtime bullying at the hands of José. “He was always throwing a punch when I least expected it,” she told me, recalling an incident where, “he punched me in the head like I was a football.” The abuse started “from the beginning,” Betty said. She confirmed that divorce was, in fact, on the agenda.

When I asked Betty about inconsistencies in her biography, she first stated that she hadn’t had time to review the details. Only when prompted by her son did Betty admit that José had “made up stories” about her, including about her dameship, and about her adoptive grandmother who was supposedly a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. “José just likes to glorify everything and show off,” Betty said.

Betty seemed irritated by a question about the existence of her diamond fortune and avoided answering it directly. “Let Roger say what he wants,” she responded with a side-eye when I told her her son said she had no assets.

But there was one aspect of Betty’s biography that she refused to walk back entirely. When Basile prompted her to “tell the truth, that you’re not a member of the British aristocracy,” Betty instead changed the subject and started talking about her home in Sintra. I asked about a story she had told me months earlier. As Betty had put it to me then, she first learned she was a descendant of British royals as a teenager, when her adoptive mother confessed the family secret.

I asked Betty to confirm this story once again. “Yes, I was told all that,” she said. Then she seemed to change her mind. In the end Betty couldn’t be sure whether her memories of her childhood were real or whether José had made them up.

José was adamant that she never physically abused Betty. But José admitted to behavior that others may consider domineering: pressuring Betty to stand up from her wheelchair, to hold her head high for photographs, to wear her old shoes and clothes. “Betty loves to look beautiful,” José said.

But spending time with the couple in New York, I witnessed instances where José’s idea of beauty seemed more than Betty could bear. Several times José tried to put a pair of Chanel flats on Betty’s swollen feet. Betty grimaced and protested with a look of pain on her face. José insisted.

“Betty would say to me sometimes, ‘You bully me, José,’” José told me later. “That is not bullying, Betty. People used to throw stones at me on the street because of the way I looked!” José wondered aloud if anything today could be considered abuse, if definitions had changed so much to be unrecognizable.

According to the couple’s friend and hairstylist Alice Pires, this dynamic dated back a few years, when José started passing up work opportunities to devote himself to the full-time job of Betty’s care. “He wants her to be her old self: to walk normal, dress beautiful, and go out to parties, but Betty’s not willing to do that anymore. So José gets frustrated. And sometimes he pushes her to her limit. Sometimes I say, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing?’ And I yell at him. But then again, who am I to judge.” Perhaps José’s spunk was keeping Betty alive, suggested Pires. “She’s having fun. A lot of people at her age, they sit at nursing homes waiting to die.”

The fateful trip to Portugal that ended in the couple’s separation seemed at first like the perfect example of an adventure that was keeping Betty young. In my presence, she said she wanted to go. “It’s so important to José,” Betty told me when we were alone. “And if I don’t go, I think I’ll regret it.”

The occasion was the baptism of José’s granddaughter Constança. (José is close with a son, now 35, from a previous marriage before Betty.) There would be extravagant flowers, a TV crew, 90 guests in attendance. It would also be a homecoming for Betty, who hadn’t traveled on a plane in years.

In early March José called me and said they had bought tickets. We scrambled to put together a photo shoot on the day before their flight. I arrived to a home in disarray. Mystery boxes were stacked in an unusable shower. Racks of clothes lined the hallways. One room looked like a Saks sample sale ravaged by raccoons. The mood was tense.

As we packed up gear around 11 p.m., I overheard the couple in tears in their bedroom.

“You’re ruining my life!” José screamed.

“I’m not coming to Portugal!” Betty said.

José came out of the bedroom in a panic. I tried to calm things down then stayed for three more hours to help pack. Around 1 a.m., a not-unusual dinnertime for the couple, Betty emerged from the bedroom. As if nothing had happened, they heated empanadas, opened a bottle of Champagne, and gossiped about nonagenarian celebrities less youthful than Betty. The next day they made their flight.

I watched the couple’s first few weeks in Portugal on social media. José had a packed schedule of influencer gigs, filming content for a sofa company, performing two shows at a drag cabaret called Glitters, and making Cameo and Instagram appearances. Betty tagged along and also attended events of her own, like a Tina Turner tribute concert.

But behind the scenes, the trip was already chaotic. Videos filmed by bystanders from the weeks surrounding the alleged domestic violence incident show José frustrated and fighting in public.

On April 25, just days after Betty went to the hospital, José waved to fans while celebrating in the streets of Lisbon for the 50-year anniversary of the Portuguese revolution. Later that night José was filmed grabbing a man’s neck in a café. José said the video was taken after the patron insulted Betty, and later apologized.

Another spat happened a few weeks earlier, with the footage going online after Betty’s complaint. The video shows José and a lawyer arriving outside the disputed villa in Sintra. José asks to be let in; their tenant, Pedro Pico, refuses. Pico accuses José of abusing Betty. José slaps Pico in the face; Pico punches back. José’s assistant Kiko recalled to me that a few minutes after the fistfight, José wiped away a nosebleed and logged onto Cameo.

I asked José about the string of events in which she appeared to lose her temper and get physical. Was it possible that José had also lost her temper with Betty? “I not lose my temper with someone in their 90s,” José told me, incredulous.

On April 20, Betty ended up in the hospital. According to José, the events of that day unfolded as follows: Betty had been feeling weak, and José gave her a B12 injection and brought her to a chair on the terrace of their hotel. When it was time to get up, Betty could no longer stand, much less cross the single step that separated the terrace. José grabbed Betty’s torso to hold her up. “Oh, be careful, be careful, I’m going to fall, I’m going to fall,” José recalled her saying. Betty did indeed fall—three times, per José—as José struggled to get her to bed. José later called an ambulance.

If Betty was now interpreting the incident as abuse, it was because her mental faculties were failing, said José. A few days before, José said, Betty had a hallucination: “She was looking out of our window at the hotel and said she saw men in uniform cutting trees,” José said. “I said, ‘Are you going senile?’” José argued that an already confused Betty fell under the influence of Basile at the hospital, who manipulated her into making a domestic violence complaint. Basile denied this.

When I asked Betty about the events on and after April 20, she said she wasn’t manipulated. I asked Betty what words she would use to describe José’s behavior toward her. “It was definitely violence. Abuse,” Betty said. “When you go down three flights, three floors,” Betty continued. “Roger said to me, ‘You’d be dead.’ I said, ‘Well, it happened. I went down.’”

Betty’s tone of voice was decisive, but her version of events was changing. When I first asked how she had ended up in the hospital, she said, “He pushed me out the window,” confirming that she meant José. Betty then remembered something different: She had been outside her hotel’s entrance when José “pushed me down three flights of stairs.”

I had visited the hotel in question when in Portugal. It didn’t have three flights of stairs at any of its entrances. I asked if perhaps Betty meant three individual stairs.

“Three floors,” Betty said again, annoyed with me for questioning her.

I asked Betty if it was possible she was confused about the specifics. “No,” she responded brusquely. “I’m not confused what happened.”

Basile, who was in the room, acknowledged his mother’s memory wasn’t particularly clear. “She keeps talking about stairs. But when she initially told me this, she said he pushed her out of a window. That’s why I had a hard time believing it was three floors up. I figured she’d be dead for sure.”

The facts may be disputed. But what about the fantasy, the myth, the love story? When I asked Betty about her and José’s love, she said that it was “not really” true. José “just needed that to build everything up,” Betty told me.

José was gutted. “I’m not going to commit suicide because I’m Catholic,” José told me when I relayed what Betty had said. “Because the things you told me now, anybody commits suicide.”

“The person I love for 30 years is no more the same person. I’m in mourning,” José said.

Diamonds are forever. But the last time I saw José and Betty, neither one of them were wearing any gems. Like most everything about their final days together, the location of the jewelry the couple once posed in for magazines is a confusing tableau of she said, she said. José admits to putting certain pieces in a bank safe days after Betty went to the hospital. “Thank God I did this,” José told me, claiming that Basile was still holding her clothes and other possessions hostage. Basile admitted to keeping the couple’s wardrobe but denied having any of their jewels. “José took everything,” Betty told me.

The ending to this love story was not the one the couple had planned. “I wish we can die at the same time,” José told me the last day we saw each other in Lisbon. “That would be romantic.”

José had always dreamed of a chic, joint funeral of icons. Everyone is dressed in black cocktail dresses, with hats and veils. There are priests. “I want to be beautiful. And I want Betty to be beautiful,” José said. “People can take everything from you but your dignity.”

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