Princess Diana's brother reveals tragic secret
Charles Spencer has bravely detailed the alleged sexual abuse he experienced as a child.
The younger brother of Princess Diana, now 59, initially made the revelation that he was abused as a child while in boarding school when he was 42.
Now, the 9th Earl Spencer is recalling the alleged trauma in his new memoir A Very Private School, and the first moment he told anyone about the abuse he experienced.
“I was doing a 10-day course of very deep introspection and therapy,” he told Fox News Digital.
“My therapist said to each of us, ‘Whisper to me one secret you’d never told anyone.’ I whispered to him that I was sexually abused as a child by an adult.
"And I remember him looking so shocked, and he had heard it all. Afterwards, he took me aside and said, ‘This is very serious stuff.’”
He added that at that stage, he already had children, and having kids of his own made him realise how devastating his experience was.
“I suddenly put it into context. What if one of my children of either gender had been subjected to this as an 11-year-old? It made my blood boil," he said.
"I then started to allow myself to feel the full devastation of what had happened to me.”
Spencer was eight when he was enrolled at Maidwell Hall, an elite English boarding school, and he claimed that it didn't take long for him to witness and experience incidents of alleged abuse.
He claimed that he was groomed and sexually abused at age 11 by an assistant matron at the school, who was 19 or 20 years old.
“It was a brutal experience,” he claimed in his memoir.
“The headmaster was a sadistic pedophile. He staffed a very small number of teachers in this place who were either … perverted or would never tell tales against him. There wasn’t really anyone to go to.“
He added that the beatings had become "a ritual part of every day," and his parents had no idea the extent of what was going on behind closed doors.
The royal also alleged that one student was whipped so badly he struggled to take off his pants at night because the dried blood and clothing stuck to his skin, and that it took two weeks for him to recover.
Spencer claimed he was allowed to write a letter to his parents once a week, with the messages being supervised so he was unable to tell his parents what was going on.
“We were just left there at the mercy of some really dangerous people,” Spencer alleged.
He said that meeting with other former pupils was what motivated him to write the new memoir, and revisit the painful memories of his past.
The historian recalled the moment he met another former student, who kept quiet about the abuse he experience because it was so traumatising.
"He told me how he was made to feel worthless every day, how he’d been seriously sexually assaulted as a nine-year-old three times by somebody who was meant to protect him," he recalled.
“I took 10 pages of notes, stopped and said, ‘This is too terrible — I can’t tell this story.’ He reached across, grabbed my arm and said, ‘Somebody has to do it – it’s got to be you.’ That convinced me, the truth needed to be shared with the world.”
The 9th Earl also said that he is undergoing “a very effective” post-traumatic stress disorder treatment, as well as Tai Chi and breathing exercises.
“I’ve got a whole armoury of support techniques to try and get to a better place,” he shared.
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