Princess Diana’s Secret Audio Tapes Reveal How Her Bulimia Started After Charles Called Her ‘Chubby’
In a freshly released series of secret audio tapes, Princess Diana talked about her failing marriage with Prince Charles. The transcripts of these audio tapes were released by Andrew Morton, author of 1992’s Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words, and they reveal that Diana’s bulimia started just weeks after her engagement, after Charles made “chubby” comments.
Princess Diana had agreed to the recordings because she wanted the world to know that her failing marriage to Charles wasn’t her doing. At the time when they were recorded, Diana was aware that Andrew Morton was working on a book about her. So she decided to reveal the secrets about her marriage to Andrew, but to avoid suspicions from the palace, the interview had to be done in secret and via a proxy. Andrew, who is 6 feet 4 inches tall and at the time was already a writer well known to most of the Palace staff, chose his close friend Dr. James Colthurst as his proxy. Colthurst conducted a total of six taped interviews with Princess Diana. The interview was conducted in Diana’s sitting room at Kensington Palace. Regarding their first session together, Colthurst reminisces:
“Diana was dressed quite casually in jeans and a blue shirt. Before we began, she took the phone off the hook and closed the door. Whenever we were interrupted by someone knocking, she removed the body microphone and hid it in cushions on her sofa.”
The transcripts of Diana’s secret audio tapes were published in the Daily Mail, and it is revealed that the whole experience of talking about here sad marriage to Charles was cathartic for Diana.
Diana reveals in the secret audio tapes that her bulimia started just weeks after her engagement with Prince Charles. She revealed that Charles had his hands in her waistline and commented on her being a little “chubby,” and this, according to her, triggered her bulimia, the Mirror reports.
“The bulimia started the week after we got engaged. My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me.”
The heart-melting interview also reveals that she actually relived the first time she made herself sick, mistaking it, at the time, for a release of tension. The princess had apparently lost almost 6 inches in her waistline between the time she tried on her wedding dress for the first time and the day she actually wore it down the aisle.
When Andrew Morton first published Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words in 1992, he caught the ire of a lot of royal sympathizers, one MP even suggesting that he be locked up in the Tower of London. But Morton always held that Diana wanted to reveal her secrets to him and didn’t regret the interviews. Morton tells the Daily Mail that the book helped Diana receive the sort of support she always deserved.
“Ironically, a biography written and produced with Diana’s enthusiastic co-operation was being piously boycotted on the suspicion that it was a pack of lies. But it soon became apparent that the book really was, as it claimed, Diana’s own true story.
“And the Princess quickly began to receive the kind of support that always meant so much to her.”
Diana and Prince Charles first met when the former was 16 and the latter was 29. Prince Charles was dating Diana’s older sister Sarah at the time. But Charles seduced Diana during his 30th birthday celebration at Buckingham Palace and the pair got married in a grand ceremony in 1981. Their marriage began failing when Charles began rekindling his old relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana got a divorce from Prince Charles in 1996. She died tragically in a car accident in Paris a year later.
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