Princess Diana’s Brother Charles Spencer Opens Up About Heartbreaking Abuse in New Memoir

Trigger Warning : This article contains themes of child abuse and sexual assault that some readers may find distressing.

Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer , revealed a bitter childhood memory that he kept hidden from the world. Although he largely shared a palpable sense of joy being around his beloved mother and sisters, one specific detail pushed him to ‘rock bottom,’ as described by Spencer himself.

Memoirs are a window to people’s lives, and in his new book, A Very Private School , the 59-year-old gave access to a devastating piece of information: child abuse. The younger brother to the late Princess of Wales recalled the harrowing incident and how it took near about seventeen years for him to speak up, per Fox News .

He was 42 years old when a therapist was made aware of the trauma he was living with. Spencer told the outlet, “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. Afterward, he took me aside and said, ‘This is very serious stuff.'”

Since he lived through the reality of being abused as a kid, he feared the same for his own children, “By that stage, I had children,” Spencer revealed. “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. I then started to allow myself to feel the full devastation of what had happened to me.”

The Earl had attended the prestigious Maidwell Hall between the ages of eight and 13 in the 1970s. While he was still struggling to deal with his own traumatic memories , meeting with other victims compelled him to walk down memory lane. “As I listened to their stories, I was appalled,” he confessed. “There was one [former student] I met with after not seeing him for 40 years. I knew from his wife that he had never talked about his time at the school because it was so traumatizing. He told me how he was made to feel worthless every day, how he’d been seriously sexually assaulted as a 9-year-old three times by somebody who was meant to protect him,” Spencer stated.

The 9th Earl Spencer recounted the horrifying experience of scratching the old wound: “This is too terrible — I can’t tell this story.” One of the victims grabbed his hand 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.” When asked if his deceased sister had any clue about the cruelty he faced at the boarding school, Spencer replied, “I don’t remember us ever really discussing what we were going through. She went to a very gentle place, I believe. We would reconnect for the school holidays, and I don’t remember ever talking about it with her,” per PEOPLE .

However, when the father of seven told his older sisters, Sarah and Jane, 18 months ago, they were ‘stunned and appalled.’ He admitted, “It was a brutal experience. 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… I think my parents had no idea of the level of cruelty and perversion that was going on,” reassuring (himself or the world), “[Otherwise] they would never have sent me there.”

CHILD ABUSE : If you know of any children who are being subjected to abuse, please contact The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at (800) 422-4453.

SEXUAL ASSAULT : If you are being subjected to sexual assault or know of anyone who is, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673)