Princess Diana’s brother Charles Spencer reveals he hired a PI to find his boarding school abuser
Charles Spencer sat down exclusively with NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden to talk about his new memoir A Very Private School
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Your support makes all the difference.Charles Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana, is speaking out about the physical and sexual abuse he says he endured at Maidwell Hall, one of England’s most prestigious boarding schools.
Spencer, who is godson of the late Queen Elizabeth II, sat down exclusively with NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden for his first interview about his new memoir A Very Private School.
Now, he’s revealing new details in a special “Silence and Secrets: Charles Spencer’s Very Private School” which will air on NBC News NOW Thursday at 10:30pm ET.
Spencer does not name the female staffer he says abused him at the school all those years ago, but told NBC that he did, at one point, employ a private investigator to look her up.
“I imagine she’s still alive,” he said. “She seems to have disappeared, she’s been married a couple of times.”
“I have no wish to ever see her again in my life,” he added.
When NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden asked if he cared to confront her, he replied “it’s too much.”
“The physical abuse, not the sexual abuse. I’ve always had a fantasy of confronting them, but not the sexual abuse, no, it’s too much.”
Spencer, who joined the school when he was eight, was inflicted with beatings to the point of drawing blood and shares that he witnessed punishments including “cutting buttocks [of young children] several times with a cane and carrying on”.
Other former students he interviewed revealed that they had been raped multiple times at the school, while some had lost their siblings to “self-neglect”. One terminally ill man stipulated a refusal to see his parents in his living will, as he could not forgive them for his experience.
The experience of being beaten by a “sadistic” headmaster who inflicted punishments with “sexual undercurrents” left a permanent mark on the Earl who says: “We had demons sewn into the linings of our souls”.
When he was just 11-years-old, Spencer was groomed and sexually abused by a female assistant matron, an experience he recalls as “incredibly traumatising” and he says that experience led him to hire a prostitute while on holiday in Spain at the age of 12 to “finish the grooming”.
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