Ten days before her death, Princess Diana opened up about feeling guilty over her controversial 1995 interview.
However, her reason for feeling bad wasn’t related to her admissions about her and Charles’ private life, but about how the interview may have impacted her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
Diana confided about her worry to her friend, Rosa Monckton, during a summer holiday in Greece in August 1997.
"She told me she regretted doing it because of the harm she thought it had done to her boys," Monckton told People.
Diana’s 1995 Panorama interview with BBC’s Martin Bashir dropped bombshells like then-Prince Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and her own affair with James Hewitt. She also opened up about her struggle with bulimia.
The interview led to the late Queen Elizabeth telling Charles and Diana to move forward with the divorce.
This comes as investigations revealed that Bashir fabricated documents to show Diana that her staff was taking money from Charles to spy on her, and that her husband was having an affair with the nanny and paid for her abortion. He also convinced her that her son William’s watch was a spying device.
"She was frail, and that made her susceptible to Bashir," Monckton said of Diana being deceived by the journalist.
"He’d told her she couldn’t talk about it. She cut people out because of that," she added.
Both Prince Harry and Prince William have criticized the BBC for their complicity in Bashir’s deception.
"Our mother lost her life because of this," Harry said in 2021, with William saying that the lies fed his mother’s "fear, paranoia, and isolation."
Princess Diana died in a car crash alongside her then boyfriend Dodi Fayed after having refused official security from the palace.
