In 2009, Adele told a Dutch TV crew her family was Turkish, Spanish and English. Nobody really clocked it at the time. Eight years later, a 52-year-old musician from a Turkish coastal town stepped forward with a story… and a memory of Adele’s mum from a holiday in Bodrum in 1987.
The internet laughed it off. Then it forgot. But the clues never really went away.
The Bodrum claim
His name is Mehmet Asar. He’s from Turkey’s western resort town of Bodrum, a renowned holiday destination for Britons. In January 2017, he sat down with Turkish news agency DHA and told them something the British press would never have published on its own.
He claimed he’d had a two-week relationship with a young English nurse called Penny Adkins. The summer was 1987. He was working as a cab driver. They toured Bodrum coves and Pamukkale together. She extended her trip. She came back twice more. They lost touch when international phone calls got too expensive to keep up.
Penny Adkins is Adele’s mother.
Asar said he only put it together years later, after Adele’s Grammy run made him curious enough to look up her family. He noticed something specific. He said his right hand’s third and fourth fingers sit adjacent when raised, the same way Adele’s do during concerts. Then he said something the rest of the world ignored. “I can even carry out a DNA test if she wants”.
That’s not the move of someone trying to scam tabloid money. That’s the move of someone who actually believes it.
He never married. He said he’d spent years thinking about her mum. And the timeline lines up. Adele was born on 5 May 1988. A Bodrum summer in 1987 would put conception roughly where it needs to be.
The story disappeared within 48 hours.
The 2009 clue everyone forgot
Then there’s the receipt that resurfaced in 2015.
A Dutch RTL crew had filmed Adele back in 2009, when she was 21 and still on the rise. They were strolling through London. The interviewer asked her about looks and weight, the kind of patronising question every female artist of that era had to swat away. Adele snapped back that she’d never been skinny. Then she said this. “All my family are so thin, they’re Turkish, Spanish and English”.
She didn’t say it like a slip. She didn’t correct herself. She rolled it out casually, like a fact she’d known her whole life, and moved on. She also added she was “half Welsh”, which she pinned on her curves.
Why would a 21-year-old kid from Tottenham, on Dutch TV of all places, randomly drop “Turkish” into her family tree if there wasn’t something behind it? Nobody invents that for fun. You don’t accidentally namecheck a country your bloodline has nothing to do with.
The clip sat dormant for six years. Then in late 2015, the Turkish internet went looking for evidence and pulled it back into the light.
And then the music started sounding familiar
The reason they were looking is the part that ties this whole thing together.
In November 2015, Adele dropped 25. The album broke every sales record going. Then Turkish Twitter clocked something. Million Years Ago sounded almost identical to Acılara Tutunmak (Clinging To Pain), a 1985 song by the late Kurdish-Turkish singer Ahmet Kaya.
Side by side, the resemblance is hard to unhear. The melodic shape, the mood, the acoustic intimacy. Turkish music critic Naim Dilmener acknowledged the resemblance but said it wasn’t enough to suggest deliberate copying. Kaya’s widow Gülten said outright theft would be unthinkable but probably wasn’t intentional.
Coincidence is the boring answer. Subconscious influence is the more interesting one. Somewhere along the way, that melody got into Adele’s head. Maybe it was on at home. Maybe a family friend played it. Maybe a holiday somewhere stuck. You don’t write a melody that close to another melody without ever having heard it.
And here’s the bit that hits different in 2026. A Rio de Janeiro judge ruled in December 2024 that Million Years Ago was a plagiarism of Brazilian songwriter Toninho Geraes’ Mulheres and ordered it pulled globally. Universal appealed. In May 2025 a Rio Court of Justice allowed it back on digital platforms. The Kaya case never went to court. The Geraes case did, and it landed.
One song. Two plagiarism rulings or accusations from completely different parts of the world. That’s not nothing.
What we actually know about Adele’s dad
For the record, Adele’s biological father in the official version is Mark Evans, a Welshman. He left Penny Adkins when Adele was two, leaving her mother to raise her alone. He’s spoken to British tabloids over the years. There’s no public dispute about him being on the birth certificate.
But here’s the thing nobody seems to have asked. Did Penny Adkins ever go to Bodrum in 1987? Was Mark Evans actually there for the conception? Has anyone actually verified anything beyond the paperwork?
Asar offered a DNA test. The world said no thanks. We’d rather not know.
The questions nobody bothered to answer
This is the part of the story that stays with you.
A man from Bodrum told a coherent story, named the right woman, got the timeline right, pointed to a physical similarity, and offered the one piece of evidence that would either prove or destroy his claim. The British press treated him like a sad joke. The Turkish press ran the story and moved on. Adele’s team never responded. No DNA test was ever taken.
Adele herself, on Dutch TV in 2009, casually dropped that her family was Turkish. Her music has now been formally accused of borrowing from a Turkish song. And somewhere in Bodrum, a man who never married once spent two weeks with a young English nurse called Penny.
You can call it coincidence. You can call it the wildest game of “what if” in pop music history. But the truth is simpler than either of those.
Nobody actually wants to know the answer.
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