Newly Released Tapes Reveal Princess Diana’s Feelings on Her Wedding to Prince Charles: “The Whole Thing Was Ridiculous”

On the heels of the twenty-sixth anniversary of her death in a Parisian car accident at age 36, newly unearthed tapes of Princess Diana’s thoughts on her marriage, family, and mental health have been released, multiple outlets report.

The tapes were recorded for Andrew Morton, the man who would essentially become Diana’s biographer, for his book Diana: Her True Story, released in 1992. The tapes, The Mirror reports, are expected to be released next year as part of a documentary, called Diana: The Rest of Her Story; while it would have been virtually impossible to interview Diana for the book, the tapes were Morton’s way to communicate with the then Princess of Wales secretly. While much of the tapes’ content has been covered already in print and the 2017 documentary Diana: In Her Own Words, more details and quotes that haven’t been spoken about before are coming to light. Here are a few of the revelations from the seven hours’ worth of tapes, of which Morton said “I think people will get a very vivid sense of her personality and her character.”

“When the first film came out, people were blown away because they had not heard Diana talk like this before,” said Tom Jennings, the producer of both the 2017 documentary and the forthcoming film. “It’s a style of storytelling that is very difficult to do, but I think it is the closest thing to the truth that you can get, because nothing gets in your way. It is important as part of Diana’s legacy to allow more of those tapes to be heard.”

On how the then Prince Charles handled confrontation—and his desire for a daughter

Prince Charles, 32, married a just-turned-20-years-old Diana Spencer on July 29, 1981, and the marriage was a mismatch essentially from the start. Beyond their age difference, Charles and Diana were simply just too different and barely knew one another, having only seriously interacted a handful of times before their engagement. In the tapes, Diana revealed how Charles had a tendency to shut down in the wake of confrontation: “At [Prince] Harry’s christening, Charles went up to mummy and said ‘We’re so disappointed, we wanted a girl,’ and mummy snapped his head off and said ‘You should realize you are lucky to have a child that’s normal,’” Diana said. “Ever since that day, the shutters have come down. That’s what he does when he gets somebody answering back at him.” Charles and Diana had two children—Prince William, born in 1982, and Harry, born in 1984; they separated in 1992 (the same year Morton’s book was released) and eventually finalized their divorce in 1996 after 15 years of marriage.

On her wedding day

Dubbed the Wedding of the Century, Diana apparently thought the whole thing was outrageous: “It was grown up,” she said on the tapes. “Here’s Diana, a kindergarten teacher. I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous.”

On her strained relationship with her stepmother

Diana’s parents divorced when she was young, and her father remarried socialite Raine Spencer (who Diana infamously called “Acid Raine”), daughter of one of Diana’s favorite romance novelists, Barbara Cartland. Raine married Diana’s father in 1976, when Diana was 15, and of her stepmother Diana said on the tapes “I was so angry. I said, ‘I hate you so much. If you only knew how much we all hated you for what you’ve done. You ruined the house. You spent daddy’s money.’ I have said everything I possibly could. Raine said, ‘You have no idea how much pain your mother put your father through.’”

Diana continued “I said, ‘Pain, Raine? It’s one word you don’t even know how to relate to. In my job, I see people suffer like you never see. You call that pain?’ I said, ‘You’ve got a lot to learn.’ I remember really going for her gullet.” (By the way, after her divorce from Charles, Diana and Raine eventually reconciled before the Princess of Wales died in 1997.)