'Breakdown': Princess Diana's Brother Charles Spencer Reveals He Sought Help at 'Residential Treatment' Center After Revisiting Childhood Abuse While Writing Memoir
March 17 2024, Published 4:30 p.m. ET
Princess Diana's younger brother, Charles Spencer, has revealed that he sought help at a "residential treatment" center for trauma after revisiting childhood abuse and suffering a "breakdown" while writing his new memoir A Very Private School, RadarOnline.com has learned.
"It took me into very dark places inside of me. I had endless nightmares. I didn't know the appalling things, the really serious things that had happened to some of my friends and contemporaries," the 9th Earl Spencer told the BBC in an interview that aired on Sunday.
"And I'd come back from having met them and interviewed them and be in pieces," he added. "And then actually at the end of last year when I'd finished the book, I had a bit of a breakdown again. And I had to go into a residential treatment for trauma for writing this book."
Spencer said 'press intrusion' was 'more dangerous back in the day.'
A Very Private School, which was released this week, details the alleged physical and sexual abuse that Spencer experienced when he was sent to Maidwell Hall, a prestigious British boarding school, at the age of eight.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Spencer, now 59, opened up about being "sexually abused by a woman as a child" in another interview with Today ahead of the book's publication.
"We were locked away," Spencer said. "We were like prisoners."
Spencer also claimed in his book that the school's headmaster inflicted "brutal beatings" on him and other young boys.
He said that he didn't tell anyone about the abuse at the time because the "biggest unwritten rule" at the school was "don't tell tales."
"We were locked away," he told Today’s Cynthia McFadden last week. "We were like prisoners. We were preyed to very bad people’s worst instincts."
Spencer said he suffered a "breakdown" after writing the book.
In a statement, Maidwell School said, "It is sobering to read about the experiences Charles Spencer and some of his fellow alumni had at the school, and we are sorry that was their experience."
"It is difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be normal and acceptable at that time. Within education today, almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the safeguarding of children, and promotion of their welfare."
His new memoir was released last week.
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Spencer and his sister suffered violence at home, too. He said that one of the nannies that looked after him and Diana "used to crack our heads together, if we were both found to have done something naughty, obviously without my father's knowledge, but it really hurt."
"It wasn't a tap on the wrist," he added. "It was a cracking crunch, you know, and I remember it still."
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