Who is Koo Stark, you’re wondering?
“Are you who you are perceived to be?
Well, I don’t think I am,” she toldThe Guardianin 2001.
This is what you oughta know about Koo Stark, Prince Andrew’s scandalous ex-girlfriend.
“Except, they forgot to order any alcohol.
[It was] a party that nearly turned into a riot.”
Her actions spoke volumes as she poured tea," Stark later told Tatler (viaThe Daily Mail).
Princess Diana, no stranger to unwanted media attention herself, also supported Stark during that difficult time.
“Diana was very concerned, kind and supportive.
… he asked: ‘What is this I am reading about you in the press?
This is not the Koo that I know,'” she later recalled toI-M Magazine.
“He was a tower of strength and was very concerned.”
He encouraged me to write down my everyday feelings and thoughts.
He said one day I should turn these notes into a book or an autobiography," she said.
“My thoughts and my journals are very private to me,” she reflected.
“I wouldn’t just publish them.”
“It was terrifying,” she told I-M Magazine.
As a result, some photographers went to extreme lengths to get to have something about Stark to publish.
“I had nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.
It was chequebook journalism at its worst.”
To survive it all, Stark needed to come up with a form of self-defense.
“I just picked my old Polaroid camera and photographed them back,” Stark told I-M Magazine.
By nature I am a very private, gentle person but these attacks were unbearable."
Stark, a budding photographer herself, soon realized that the photos she took actually had some artistic merit.
“It was interesting for me to see the photographs, to see the faces,” she recalled.
Soon enough, she had an exhibition, and a book soon followed.
Purely by accident, she’d found her calling.
She kept going, too.
The spiritual practice was still relatively uncommon in the early 1980s, but that didn’t stop them.
She cut herself a heart-shaped band-aid to put over the wound.
When she traveled to Sikkim to meet the Dalai Lama, he prayed for her. "
“She’s now a practicing Buddhist.
“If you don’t have any breast tissue, your likelihood of developing breast cancer is 0.02%.
It’s much better to have no bosoms at all,” she wrote in an essay forThe Standard.
Interestingly, Stark believes that her highly public life led in some way to the development of the disease.
They all combined to leave me weakened.”
Stark didn’t just miss out on back payments.
This is, of course, immaterial to the prince’s alleged guilt.
This is not the person portrayed by Virginia Roberts."
It sure sounds like the royal family believes his behavior was unacceptable, even if Koo Stark does not.
