Eurovision has taken place under a darkening cloud of geopolitics in recent years, with Israel’s continued involvement sparking criticism and even boycotts. Nevertheless, it remains the world’s biggest platform for kooky, eccentric and downright bonkers acts.
But one of this year’s favourites is taking to the stage with a defiant fightback.
For 2026, Finland has paired up singers Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, who had never met before their Eurovision journey began last year. Parkkonen has been in the spotlight since 2008, when the now 36-year-old won the Finnish TV series Idols, but Lampenius’s story – first of triumph, then unjust condemnation and long overdue redemption – began decades earlier.
Born into a Swedish-Finnish family, the musician, now 56, was a child protégé who began performing as a singer with her musical parents at the age of three. And while most children were still navigating the basics of reading and writing, she expanded her skillset to become a violinist, making appearances on Finnish television and holding her own on stage alongside far older peers.
By her twenties, Lampenius was first violinist for the Finnish National Orchestra, which she toured with for three years before going solo. It was during her solo career in the 1990s that Lampenius’s path crossed with that of Peter Nygard – a Finnish businessman and Jeffrey Epstein associate who is now serving jail time for serious sexual offences against women and girls.
Nygard was eventually jailed in 2024 but Lampenius had bravely blown the whistle on his crimes in 1998, when she gave a newspaper interview Europe wasn’t ready for. In the article, the musician explained that she was sent to the businessman’s California home in 1997 after signing a management agreement that she later described as “a deal with the devil”.
She recalled stories that now feel uncomfortably familiar: parties filled with naked women, attempts to “lure” them to a Caribbean island, and sexual assault. In a social media post in 2023, she reflected: “I knew that Nygard was a creepy guy and nothing good would come out of a visit [to] his house. I just had to open my mouth. I had to stop it. No more women should be sent to his house.”
“Based on my own experiences, I can say that every woman should be very careful around Nygard,” she had said in the 1998 interview. But while Lampenius hoped her words would be heeded as a warning, or spark an investigation, she was left stunned when the narrative turned against her.
“Obviously many powerful men got angry at me, but the most horrible thing was that so many women in Finland ‘spit on me’ and said things like, ‘She is saying this just because she wants one more article about herself in the media!’” she wrote on social media in 2023.
Nygard himself also responded – launching a £30m defamation lawsuit against the musician and forcing her into a legal battle that she ultimately lost after being drained of years of hard-earned funds. In 2001, with her professional reputation and career in tatters, she was forced to buy a full-page advert in a prominent Finnish tabloid apologising to Nygard for her comments.
She later told a Swedish paper: “I became the villain. I was the one who told women to beware of him. I had to pretend that I had lied about him. After that, Finns hated me for 20 years.”
It wasn’t until 2015, after allegations had been slowly mounting from other women, that the FBI began investigating Nygard for sex trafficking. In 2019, post-#MeToo, police in the Bahamas also began looking into six allegations of sexual assault against victims who were under 16. By 2020, the fashion mogul was also facing multiple lawsuits from women who said he sexually assaulted them, and in February of that year, his business’s New York HQ was raided by the FBI.
That June, the number of women who had joined a class-action lawsuit against Nygard had reached 52. As he fought these claims – arguing the statute of limitations had expired for many of them – two of his sons launched legal action against their father, claiming he had directed a woman to sexually assault them. He was arrested in December 2020 to face charges of sex trafficking and was denied bail.
The lawsuits continued rolling in as criminal investigations were underway, and it was in October 2021 that Nygard was charged with the offences he would later be jailed for: assaults on four women in Toronto, aged between 16 and 28, from the late 1980s to 2005. After a trial in Canada, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2024.
Nygard’s imprisonment brought long overdue redemption for Lampenius. In December last year, the newspaper she’d been forced to take out the apology advert in was made to pay her back the money. Eurovision is something of a final chapter in this part of her story.
The last, and only, time Finland was victorious was in 2006, when costume-clad rockers Lordi stormed to victory with “Hard Rock Hallelujah”. But if they triumph this year, it’ll likely be a far more emotional affair.
Alongside Parkkonen, Lampenius will perform "Liekinheitin", which means “flamethrower”, a song they’ve co-written. “It’s my revenge, my middle finger to Nygard,” Lampenius recently told The Mirror. “Winning Eurovision would be the ultimate.”
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