Aleksandra Mladenovic: I Could Have Gone to Prison
Aleksandra Mladenovic used an awards night in Lajkovac to raise the question of Uros Zivkovic's age when they dated, saying he was not yet 18. They are on good terms now, she says.
Aleksandra Mladenovic brought up the age of her former boyfriend Uros Zivkovic herself, at an awards ceremony in Lajkovac, telling Blic that he was not yet 18 when the two were together.
The singer picked up the female singer of the year prize that night. Zivkovic took the male singer of the year award. The prize is called the Golden Apple, and the ceremony is where the two ran into each other.
Asked afterwards where things stand between them now, she did not hold back.
“We got in touch with each other, we’re really fine. I’m fine with Jovana too. Come on, people, we were kids back then, what did we know? Uros wasn’t of age, I could still have ended up in prison.”
Jovana is Zivkovic’s wife. Mladenovic went out of her way to say there is no friction there either. In the same exchange she added, “What is wrong with you? That was 100 years ago,” which is her way of putting the passage of time ahead of everything else.
What changed since her first denial
This is not the first time she has been asked about Zivkovic. We covered the earlier round, when she rejected the idea that the two had a fling and described what they had as an actual relationship.
“We never had a fling. We were in a relationship. Fine, we were kids back then, that was 12 years ago…”
The second answer goes further. Alongside the same defence of the relationship, she volunteered the detail about his age and then named the legal consequence that could have followed. Nobody asked her that part. That is what turns a repeated story into a fresh one.
How long ago was the relationship?
She places it roughly twelve years back. She insists it was not a short episode but a real relationship, and on that point her two statements line up word for word.
What shifted is the register. The first time she was defending how serious the relationship had been; the second time she opened up its most sensitive angle on camera at a prize-giving, rather than in an arranged interview.
What she said about the award
Asked how it felt to win, she kept it short.
“The feeling is wonderful. Motivation to be even better, to, well, progress even more.”
She talked about herself in the same register. Apart from her appearance, she says, nothing about her has moved.
“Generally speaking, I’ve been the same from the start. I changed my hair colour. I haven’t changed anything else.”
She added a line about herself: “I’m still that same girl who isn’t a girl any more.”
Two awards, one former couple
Pressed on the fact that both headline prizes of the evening went to her and to her ex, Mladenovic refused to put it down to chance.
“It isn’t that, it isn’t, it isn’t accidental, that is the factual state of things.”
What is left after all of it is a statement that now sits next to a trophy the two of them shared on the same night. Both are still working the same circuit, the same venues and the same award shows, so they will end up on the same winners’ list again. Every one of those nights now carries this question, whatever she says about being on good terms with Zivkovic and with Jovana.
So far the public has heard two answers to the same question. The first denied a fling, the second raised the age issue on its own. Both were given to reporters in passing, at the ceremony and just after it. Anything beyond that would take a sit-down interview, and Aleksandra Mladenovic has not announced one.
