Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, sees “echoes” of what happened to his late sister in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s treatment by the public.
“If you look at an article in a tabloid about Diana or the couple that you’re mentioning, Harry and Meghan, they can be really, really unpleasant,” the 9th Earl Spencer pointed out to the BBC in a Sunday interview about his forthcoming book, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.”
“I think it would be really beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example,” he continued, referencing his sister’s death in August 1997 at age 36.
Diana, notably, died in a high-speed Paris car crash while being pursued by photographers.
Spencer subsequently took aim at “cancerous” criticism of Harry, 42, and Markle, 45 — while clarifying he was not there “to speak for” them.
“For anyone who is being destroyed in this way daily, it must be such a cancerous influence in their life,” the 62-year-old noted.
Spencer said that his late sibling was “very, very sensitive to criticism” and disputed the belief that she “had this splendid life, it was all amazing, [and] she was so privileged and so perfect in so many ways.”
He recalled Diana being “really brought low” by her experience in the spotlight, saying, “I think it’s a pity when I see echoes of that now.”
Harry has made similar comparisons since marrying Markle in 2018 and navigating multiple scandals, from their 2020 United Kingdom exit to their return to England last month.
In his 2021 AppleTV+ series, “The Me You Can’t See,” the Duke of Sussex said, “You want to talk about history repeating itself — they’re not going to stop until [Meghan] dies.
“It’s incredibly triggering to potentially lose another woman in my life, but the list is growing,” he continued at the time. “And it all comes back to the same people, the same business model, the same industry.”
Additionally, he gushed over the personality traits his mother shared with the “Suits” alum, explaining, “[My wife] has the same compassion, she has the same empathy, she has the same confidence. She has this warmth about her.”
Harry, we hear, was made aware of the bombshells coming in Spencer’s memoir, which comes out Tuesday, and headline-making excerpts of the tell-all that have been making headlines all week were not “a shock” to him.
In the book, Spencer alleged King Charles III, who was divorced from Diana at the time of her death, sounded “giddily elated like a lottery winner” after her fatal crash.
He also wrote that the now-monarch, 77, vowed that his former spouse would be “forgotten soon enough.”
Charles hit back at the claims in a statement about how “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.”
Spencer, meanwhile, doubled down during his conversation with the BBC, insisting he was “telling the truth” about the “monstrous” comments.
“I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said,” he alleged. “I was hyper alert to what he was saying and those are precisely the words that he said and I promise that to you now. Genuinely, that is what he said. I don’t hear him saying he didn’t say that.”
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