Charles Spencer is best known asthe younger brother of Princess Diana.
“I mean, I still have nightmares about that,” he said.
“It was really traumatizing.
The whole thing was really, really horrible.”
The siblings' childhood, however, was not as idyllic as one might assume.
“I remember Mummy crying an awful lot.”
Their mother eventually left.
Diana was 5 years old, and Charles was still an infant.
Not her fault, she couldn’t do it," Charles toldThe Sunday Times.
Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came."
Their parents divorced in 1969.
Charles was just 3.
Their mother married Kydd in 1969, while they continued to live at Althorp with their father.
“It was all about making the boys as frightened as possible,” Spencer recalled.
“The whole process of being punished was ritualistic and barbaric.”
“What would you say if the genders were reversed?”
The childhood trauma from that abuse, he claimed, came to manifest itself when he became an adult.
“We had demons sewn into the linings of our souls.”
What Spencer didn’t come to learn until years later was that he’d been conned by Bashir.
Nevertheless, Diana agreed to the interview.
“Without Spencer,” the source added, “Bashir wouldn’t have got to her.”
He then called his other sister, whose husband worked for Queen Elizabeth II.
While they spoke, she told Spencer that her husband was on the other line.
I am afraid she’s dead.'
So I sat up the rest of the night," he recalled.
He made that clear in the scathing statement he issued following the fatal accident.
When some of his advisers read the eulogy, they advised him to delete that part.
“I agreed with them: This was to be about Diana,” he wrote.
Decades later, Spencer came to the conclusion that Diana’s death had positively impacted how tabloids treat celebrities.
“I was furious, I wasn’t just angry,” Spencer said in a 2017 interview withPeople.
“[I thought] what could I have done.
But you always think, God, I wish I could’ve protected her.
It was just … it was devastating.”
He added, “I always felt … intensely protective towards her.”
Those remarks, however, caused consternation with some former royal staffers.
Spencer was vindicated when The Times issued a retraction.
That’s the takeaway from his first two marriages, both of which ended in divorce.
The couple welcomed four children and moved to her native South Africa.
Sadly, the marriage didn’t last, and the two divorced in 1997.
A few years later, he remarried, tying the knot with Caroline Freud in 2001.
A few years later, he became engaged to Lady Bianca Eliot, but eventually called it off.
He married for the third time in 2011, to Karen Gordon.
This time, Spencer seemed to have gotten it right; as of 2024, the two remain married.
“Put it this way,” he toldThe Guardian.
Some of them, however, have reportedly had their issues with him over the years.
Spencer hasn’t publicly revealed why he wasn’t present for his daughters' nuptials.
Spencer took toInstagramto pay tribute to the woman he called Aunt Mary, the sister of Spencer’s mother.
“It would have been a fascinating tale.
I’m immensely proud to have been one of her nephews.”
“They were at very different stages of development.
Diana was young and had limited life experience, and Prince Charles was already a great thinker.
He read a great deal,” Roche told theDaily Mailin 2017.
“They were, perhaps, different people.”
