Diana: The Unheard Truth Will Be Full of Secrets

Just as the British royal family thought they might be back in good graces after a generally well-received and reputation-repairing reception in America in April, after dealing with a potentially monarchy-ending scandal with the relative formerly known as Prince Andrew, another specter from the past is set return to haunt them.

Princess Diana’s voice will be heard once again in a three-part documentary series titled Diana: The Unheard Truth, which will feature five hours’ worth of her spilling her soul on “secret audio tapes.” While the Princess of Wales died in a car crash in 1997, her face and her story have left a lasting impact and an innate curiosity about how the complex figure really felt about her time in the monarchy.

Back in the ’90s, author Andrew Morton colluded with Diana to release an “authorized/unauthorized” tell-all book called Diana: Her True Story, which was created using audiocassettes of interviews between Diana and her friend James Colthurst in 1991. When the book was released in 1992, all hell broke loose: Diana detailed her dreadful treatment by the royal family; the then-Prince Charles’s affair with the then-Camilla Parker-Bowles; her struggles with eating disorders and postnatal depression. It caused a nuclear fallout in the royal family and was the final nail in the coffin for Charles and Diana’s marriage — they divorced a few years afterward.

Previously, only one hour of the full tapes has been made public, but the next five hours of never-before-heard audio of Dianas’s deepest thoughts on her marriage to Prince Charles and raising her sons William and Harry in a broken palace will likely make for emotionally charged viewing, even 30 years on. Produced by Love Monday, the docuseries is still being shopped around for a distributor worldwide, but there’s a lot of lore around the tapes that you may not know. And here you thought The Crown was juicy.

The tapes were a secret at first

The audiocassettes were originally used as the basis of Andrew Morton’s 1992 expose, Diana: Her True Story. The memoir was claimed to be based on stories from sources about Diana, but the source turned out to be Diana herself. In a remarkable act of subterfuge and to escape suspicion, Morton never directly interviewed Diana and instead used a trusted friend of Diana’s as a middleman, Doctor James Colthurst. Morton would give a list of questions to Colthurst, who would then read them to Diana at Kensington Palace and record her answers on tape. It’s all awfully charming and English, as Colthurst would then bike the intimate audiotapes back to Morton, who would credit the explosive contents to “someone” close to the royal. When Diana died, Morton revealed that it had been her own voice all along.

They’ve never been heard in full

Somewhere, presumably backed up to the hilt, the six audiotapes still belong in a maximum-security safe with Morton, who has now released them to the production. Along with Colthurst, he will appear in the documentary to talk about the experience (as will an old school friend of Diana’s, her hairdresser, and, er, her personal astrologer?). Parts of the tapes — and other interviews she filmed, like one with her old voice coach — have been heard in documentaries before, such as 2004’s Princess Diana: The Secret Tapes or 2017’s Diana: In Her Own Words, but this will be the first time a deep dive from the audio of the remaining five of the six hour-long tapes has been broadcast.

They will give us a better timeline of the dissolution of Diana and Charles’s relationship

Diana was just 20 when she married Charles, who was 32, in 1981, after meeting just 13 (13!) times beforehand. The births of their sons, William in 1982 and Harry in ’84, couldn’t plaster over the cracks in their turbulent relationship. In the tapes, Diana says she realized her marriage was over when she gave birth to Harry. Charles had been hoping for a girl and apparently said, “Oh. It’s a boy.” He then supposedly left the new mum and babe to go and play polo. “Something inside of me died,” Diana said of his reaction. 

As reported, both Charles and Diana were having affairs, but by 1991, Diana had had enough of being gaslit by those in the royal Establishment and believed it was time to go scorched earth with her memoirs. To borrow a very modern phrase: It was time for her to reclaim the narrative. The book was published in June 1992, and the couple officially separated in December of the same year. Then, in 1993, the excruciating phone calls between Charles and Camilla were released — you know the ones, where Charles says he’d like to be a Tampax inside her — and a PR crisis-management TV interview followed in June 1994. In the interview, Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role, he admitted adultery in the marriage for the first time. Diana hit back with her own Panorama interview in 1995, where she uttered the now-iconic line: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” The pair were eventually given permission to split for good by Queen Elizabeth and were divorced by July 1996.

The tapes became a form of therapy

Perhaps as there were no cameras on Diana, just a small tape recorder whirring away silently in the corner, the princess forgot she was chatting with a close friend. Morton, speaking in a documentary called Diana: Her True Story, says that when he heard the first interviews, he “was shocked.”

“It was like a prisoner who had not been allowed to speak to anybody for 20 years,” he said. “She spoke in a torrent. The words just tumbled out like she had to get the words out before the guards came.” He added that in his opinion, her reason for doing it was that “It was an extraordinary act of desperation.” 

There were no holds barred in the interviews, as Morton told the Times of London the traumas that she spoke about at length: “It was like being transported into a parallel universe as the Princess of Wales spoke about her unhappiness, her sense of betrayal and her isolated life as a prisoner of the palace. As she talked, she made three astonishing revelations: her suicide attempts, her eating disorder — bulimia nervosa — and her husband’s love for a woman called Camilla.”

We will get even more details about the Charles and Camilla affair

In a scene straight from Love Actually, Diana previously detailed how she confirmed Charles and Camilla’s longstanding affair: through jewelry. A few days before the wedding — according to Morton — the princess visited the office of Michael Colborne, who was Prince Charles’s personal secretary, where she discovered a gold bracelet from the fancy London jeweler Asprey (where gold bracelets today currently cost up to $37,500). “So I opened [the box] and there was the bracelet,” she said on the tape. It had a lapis pendant engraved with the letters F and G, which were said to stand for Fred and Gladys, Charles and Camilla’s pet names for each other inspired by a sketch from The Goon Show. Diana’s worries were hurriedly dismissed, and she was told that the then-prince was simply giving thoughtful gifts to women he had known as a kind good-bye. It gets worse! Camilla gifted Charles some cufflinks emblazoned with two C’s. Chanel? Potentially, if we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt, but he wore them on his honeymoon. As Diana put it in her candid interviews: “rage, rage, rage.” King Charles and Queen Camilla eventually got married in 2005, but they’re unlikely to come out looking well on the historic tapes with more details about their lengthy affair possibly coming to light.

And some insight on her “thoughts on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor”

Producers Love Monday promise that “the tapes will reveal Diana’s thoughts on her ex-husband Charles, now King Charles III, his wife Camilla, and even Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who then was Prince Andrew.” Whether anything incriminating about Mountbatten-Windsor will be revealed in reference to Jeffrey Epstein — following a financial settlement to the now late Virginia Giuffre in 2022, rumoured to be millions of dollars, Mountbatten-Windsor has always denied any wrongdoing — remains to be seen. But with the benefit of hindsight, will anything she says about her knowledge of the disgraced royal take on a darker meaning? Could Di’s last revenge be taking down the monarchy from her grave?

But most haunting will be hearing Diana’s vision of the future

Apparently — likely thanks to her astrologist — Diana was pretty prescient. In the tapes, she talks about being in the spotlight and her own dreams, and she even predicts that Charles will go on to marry Camilla, leaving Diana free to “carve her own path.” Sadly, the latter didn’t come true. As per The Hollywood Reporter, Love Monday said, “Viewers will be astounded to hear how accurate she was in predicting the future. However, what is truly astounding is to hear Diana’s thoughts on Charles, Camilla, William, Harry, Fergie … through the lens of all that has happened in the intervening years.”

Still, there might be fun stuff

Any fans of Princess Di will be thrilled to hear about the documentary but also to find out if she will finally confirm one of the U.K.’s greatest urban myths. In a 2013 memoir, The Power of Positive Drinking, the comedian Cleo Rocos detailed a wild night out she had with Diana, Freddie Mercury, and Kenny Everett. According to the legend, on a random afternoon in the ’80s, the gang were watching The Golden Girls and drinking Champagne when they decided to drag up Diana in a baseball cap, bomber jacket, and sunglasses, making her look like a “rather eccentrically dressed gay male model,” and take her to the iconic London gay bar, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Rocos added in her book that they pulled it off: “We were nudging each other like naughty schoolchildren. Diana and Freddie were giggling … Once the transaction was completed, we looked at one another, united in our triumphant quest. We did it!” Can we all take a moment to manifest that this is the story to be unearthed in those unheard tapes, please …