‘Making infants is numerous enjoyable, is not it Boris? Raising them, that is the artwork’: The scathing phrases of Becker’s ex-wife as she goes on the warpath over the 1000’s she says he owes her to lift their son

Does Boris Becker even know how much a 16-year-old boy eats? Especially when that teenager is built like, well, Boris Becker?

The question is asked by an exasperated Lilly Becker, second wife of the Wimbledon tennis champion, and mother of his son Amadeus. She mimes standing in front of the fridge, door open.

‘Here in Germany we have these big sausages – die Würste. To eat one would take me three days. For Amadeus that’s a snack. Fifteen minutes. Gone! He’s a bottomless pit. I can’t fill him up.’

Ditto with clothes. She points out that Amadeus is taller than his dad now, but the latest growth spurt has been rapid. ‘He’s a different size every six weeks. Thank God he doesn’t want designer gear; he’s not into logos.

‘Amadeus is a British boy through and through but the cost of living in England on a single income was too much for me.’ We will get to this, but surely his dad, one of the most celebrated sportsmen in the world, helps here?

Becker famously went to prison in 2022 after being found guilty of hiding £2.5million in assets following his 2017 bankruptcy, but he has now rebuilt his life (and, presumably, at least some of his finances). His bankruptcy was discharged in 2024. Lilly is slightly built but draws herself up from the waist, eyes ablaze. If she played tennis (she doesn’t), she’d be going for the killer ‘Boom Boom’ serve about now.

‘Let me tell you something about Boris. The last time I said to him “he could do with some clothes”, he bought Amadeus a designer hoodie and took him and his school friend to a five-star resort in Dubai. It shows how out of touch he is that he’ll make these grand gestures but he won’t pay the money a court has ordered him to pay to cover the basics.

‘Since he got out of prison, he’s had time to make a new baby, go on expensive holidays, post all happy family stuff on Instagram. What about the teenager he already has?

‘My boyfriend has helped me out with those basics before, and it’s not even his duty. Aren’t you ashamed by that, Boris?’

Lilly has this habit of addressing her ex – who has five children with four women, including a daughter who was famously conceived in a restaurant broom cupboard during an illicit liaison – as if he’s in the room with us. Sometimes her tone is one of annoyance. Bizarrely, she can even be quite sweet about him.

At this moment, she’s just resigned, exhausted, absolutely furious. ‘Making babies is lots of fun, isn’t it?’ she says to the absent Boris. ‘Raising them, that’s the art. I don’t remember you doing that. I did the hospitals at midnight, the homework and the crying and the hormones. But off you go, talking about what a good father you are.’

Blimey. What on earth have we stepped into here? All-out war, it seems. It’s widely known that when the nine-year marriage between Boris and Lilly ended in 2018 it was an acrimonious split. What perhaps wasn’t appreciated, until now, is that the battle has been fought in courtrooms both in the UK and Germany.

At the heart of Lilly’s frustrations today is the issue of child maintenance. Back in 2018, the family courts in the UK ordered Boris Becker to pay £8,000 a month to Lilly, to cover the costs of raising their child. At first the money was paid. Even when it was clear Boris was in hot water, financially speaking, his son did not suffer. The private school fees were still and continue to be met, as was the core maintenance payment.

‘The trustees made sure it was paid, because they understand what a court order means,’ Lilly says, pointing out that this money was ring-fenced. When Boris went to prison, however, that core maintenance payment stopped. She says she was ‘very understanding about it’, given the circumstances.

‘I didn’t make a fuss about it. I knew it was a difficult situation. I thought “We will work this out, in time”. I thought “He will make this right when he gets out”.’

Hurrah, then, that Boris had to serve only eight months of his two-and-a-half year sentence. As soon as he was released from prison, there was a lucrative book deal. He was back on the media circuit, free to earn, free to (as Lilly puts it) ‘have his nice life and post from Portofino on his Instagram’.

The issue for Lilly (‘but more for my son’) is that she claims Boris is hugely in arrears with those child maintenance payments. While he has continued to contribute to the school fees along with a five-figure sum in 2025, Lilly claims she is owed a substantial six-figure sum.

She declines to be specific about the exact amount. Suffice to say, it could buy a lot of sausages. For his part, Boris’s lawyer Christian-Oliver Moser has said: ‘The decision in England was only intended to secure claims temporarily for a maximum of 12 months. The alleged payment claims do not exist.’

Last August, Dutch-born Lilly and Amadeus moved from Wimbledon, south-west London – where Amadeus had spent his whole life – to Germany. The primary factor was financial, she insists.

Although she has continued to work as a model and presenter, she felt that rising costs had made London unaffordable for a single parent. The fact that her new partner, sports agent Thorsten Weck, is based in Dusseldorf (although they still don’t live together) made the decision easier. She says Boris – by then remarried, to his third wife, Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro, and with a new baby girl on the way (Zoe Vittoria would be born in November 2025) – applauded and supported the relocation.

‘He said it would be great for him, better than us being in London – where he is forbidden from entering. And because he was often in Dusseldorf for work and could see Amadeus more often.’

There was also an understanding, she claims, that Boris would help Amadeus with his German. ‘Amadeus didn’t speak it at all when we moved over so I thought “great”.’

How has that one panned out? ‘Boris never speaks to him in German. He does visit but doesn’t see him as much as I hoped.

‘And he wants Amadeus to fly to Italy to see him. It’s typical Boris. His way is the only way. Everything has to be on his terms.’

The German courts became involved last year, when Lilly applied to have the existing British court order over maintenance payments enforced in Germany. A simple technicality, she thought. She was ‘shocked’ when her ex-husband fought it. After the UK maintenance order had been declared enforceable in Germany, he filed a complaint against this German declaration of enforceability, which he ultimately lost.

‘I was flabbergasted. He wasn’t being asked for anything extra. Our position is that this was simply the sum that had been agreed in 2018.’

Boris, she says, has now applied to the court to have the maintenance order modified for the future so that, instead of £8,000, he would pay only 1,176 euros, the equivalent of £1,000. The legal situation is complex but successive court orders in the UK had given Becker more time to comply with the order, yet he’s still fighting it.

What further infuriates Lilly is the spiralling court costs. She points out that her ex put down a 26,000-euro security deposit as part of his appeal.

‘And he’s still lost – that money is now tied up and can ultimately be paid out either to him or to me. That 26k could have been used to meet the maintenance order. When we were together it was always Boris’s way. Now, I think he just wants to win. It’s as if we are at Wimbledon, going into the fifth set, and when is it going to end? That’s the mentality I’m dealing with here.’

So when is it going to end?

‘Oh, I’m happy to go to the sixth set, but this isn’t Wimbledon. There is no trophy at the end.’

She has been particularly incensed by a recent podcast interview Boris gave to Louis Theroux, suggesting that both Lilly and his first wife, Barbara Feltus (the mother of his two oldest sons Noah and Elias), had done very well out of him financially and had only married him for his money and fame.

Again, she addresses Boris directly. ‘Have your own narrative. Write your own story. Fine. But to say this out loud? Disgusting! Maybe you’re still hurting from something. I don’t know. To suggest we were after his money. Well it’s ridiculous. I loved that man. All his women supported him, stood by him, made him look good on the red carpet. Boris is a ladies’ man, and, believe me, he needed us to make him look good. Now to paint us like that . . . I’m not having it. How dare you denigrate the mother of your son when you are the one who isn’t meeting the responsibilities laid down in law.

‘Boris operates on Boris Law, always has. Amadeus adores his father. He worships him. Maybe I’ve protected him too much. When Boris went to prison I was the one making it all OK, telling him it would be fine. Enough.’

By the time she met him in 2005, Boris already had three children, two from his first marriage and Anna Ermakova from that infamous tryst. Boris has talked recently in interviews about his now close relationship with Anna, 26, a model, singer and reality star.

Does Amadeus have a relationship with her? Is he close to Barbara’s sons? ‘Oh, he adores his big brothers Noah and Elias. Remember, Noah was there when he was born. He’s always been around and when he phones today Amadeus is so excited. Unfortunately, Amadeus has never met Anna yet. That will come. When she was on Let’s Dance [the German version of Strictly], I showed him pictures and he said, “Oh, I have a sister. She’s so pretty and so famous.”

‘Maybe when he’s older, 19 or 20, he will call her because they were both born in London, but . . . I will leave that to that generation. They will do their own thing.’

And where does the new half-sibling, baby Zoe, fit into this? ‘Oh, Amadeus has met the baby, obviously. I want Amadeus to have relationships with his siblings.

‘There’s a word in German, the verb gönnen. It means to wish someone well, to be happy for them. I want to be happy for him, to see him with his new family, his new life, and say, “That’s my ex-husband, the father of my child” and to be proud of him. But he won’t allow me that because he puts me in defence fighting mode.

‘All I want is for this to end. For Amadeus to have a father who shows up – not for the holidays and the five-star hotels, but for the ordinary, unglamorous, non-negotiable business of being his father.’

And buying sausages.