PRINCESS DIANA’S brother Earl Spencer has revealed his “immensely sad” divorce from his third wife and the reason their marriage broke down.
Charles Spencer said he wanted to dedicate himself to his children and grandchildren.
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Charles, 60, told Mail on Sunday: “It’s immensely sad.
“I just want to dedicate myself to all my children and my grandchildren, and I wish Karen every happiness in the future.”
Karen Gordon, the Countess of Spencer, and Charles married in June 2011 after meeting on a blind date in a Los Angeles restaurant the previous year.
The two married in the grounds of Althorp, where Diana is buried, four months after Charles proposed.
They had one daughter together, Lady Charlotte Diana Spencer, who was born in 2012 and raised in Althorp.
It is believed their marriage ended in recent years under the strain of the Earl’s memoir, A Very Private School, where he detailed the physical and sexual abuse he suffered while at boarding school.
In the book, he claims he was abused by a matron’s assistant at Maidwell Hall when he was a child in the 1970s.
He described his school life as “an absolutely hellish experience.”
Karen, a Canadian philanthropist, is the founder of the charity Whole Child and mother to Emma and Kate from a previous marriage to Mark Gordon, with the couple married between 1997 and 2003.
Charles is the father of Lady Kitty Spencer, twins Eliza and Amelia Spencer and Louis Spencer, Viscount Althorp, with his ex-wife Victoria Aitkin.
The Earl is also the father of Edmund and Lara, who he shares with his second wife, Caroline Freud.
Charles, who is the 9th Earl Spencer, is the uncle of Prince William and Prince Harry.
He works as a historian, journalist and broadcaster, as well as managing the Althorp estate, the Spencers’ ancestral seat in Northamptonshire.
Karen was absent from Althorp in March for the book launch events, and the Earl later revealed she had admitted herself to residential treatment for trauma at the end of last year.
Charles told The Sunday Times in 2020: “Karen and I appreciate what each other does and look after what we have. None of us have found happiness like this before.”
The Earl told the MoS that the five years he spent working on his book had deeply affected him and led him to undergo residential trauma treatment late last year.
He is thought to have been especially traumatized by the discovery of a student diary dated 1976, in which the matron’s assistant, who he says sexually abused him, had written a long-forgotten message.
The diary was found on the top shelf of a room in Althorp that was being renovated after he had finished most of the book.
Charles wrote that he was “shaken” by the discovery.
In the memoir, the Earl also revealed the trauma of his mother leaving him and Diana when he was just three years old and also wrote about the impact that being raised by a succession of nannies had on him.
In an interview with the Therapy Works podcast in March, Charles said that being abused as a child had a huge impact on his choice of romantic partners as an adult, adding that he was susceptible to women who were incapable of loving him.
He told the podcast: “I think I went for beautiful people who weren’t really into love.
“I’m taking a good look at myself and everything around me and I think I would be a lot easier to live with now than in the past.”
Karen’s first husband was millionaire Hollywood producer Mark Gordon, whose credits include Saving Private Ryan and The Day After Tomorrow.
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