The most notorious interview Princess Diana gave during her life was when she revealed how Prince Charles was having an affair during their marital life.
Television journalist Martin Bashir conducted the interview, and the whole world was shocked to see how the royal family isn’t all great as they seem. Simone Simmons was a close friend of Princess Diana, and she revealed in the Amazon Prime documentary Diana: The Woman Inside, how Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York was the one to tell Diana to speak out.
Diana was very happy with how the interview turned out, and she phoned Simmons immediately to tell her to see it. Penny Junior, a royal biographer shared for the International Business Tribune, “She was very pleased with what she’d done at the time, she thought it was a great performance and she was thrilled. “She rang up her friends and said, ‘you must watch.’”
Diana said how she thought that they would concentrate more on her charity work, but they focused more on her ongoing divorce from Prince Charles, and both of their affairs – Charles with Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana with James Hewitt. Simmons told Diana how she made a “prat” out of herself, and she questioned Diana about who gave her the idea to talk about her marriage. Diana said it was Ferguson and some other friend.
Town and Country reported how Ferguson and Diana didn’t have a very good relationship. When both women married in the royal family, they never quite felt like they were fully accepted.
After Princess Diana’s death in 1997, a close friend of hers revealed how Princess Diana “deeply regretted” for all the things she shared in that infamous interview. And even Ferguson commented on it in 2003, stating how Bashir “tricked” Diana. “He pulled her into a comfort zone by being this wonderful magnanimous man and by saying ‘I’m a family man as well’ and got her to talk that way,” Ferguson shared. “And, of course, ‘off the record’ doesn’t exist.”
Source: rd.com