Charles Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana of Wales, has announced that he and his wife, Karen Gordon, have decided to divorce after 13 years of marriage. “It is immensely sad,” revealed the ninth Earl Spencer, 60, when Daily Mail this Saturday June 8th. “I just want to dedicate myself to all my children and my grandchildren, and I wish Karen all the happiness in the future,” she said. This is the third divorce for the uncle of William and Henry of England. According to the British tabloid, last March, the couple already announced their separation to the staff of the Althorp estate, where Ladi Di, who died in a car accident in Paris in August 1997, is buried. Spencer and Gordon, a Canadian philanthropist 52 years old, they met on a blind date at a restaurant in Los Angeles in 2010. A year later, in June, they got married at this estate in the English county of Northamptonshire.
The now ex-couple have a 12-year-old daughter in common named Charlotte Diana, whose name pays tribute to the count’s late older sister. Spencer also has four children from his marriage to his first wife, Victoria Lockwood, and two children with his second wife, Caroline Freud. Karen is also the mother of two daughters from her previous marriage to Hollywood producer Mark Gordon.
The British newspaper claims that Spencer and Karen’s relationship fell apart while he was writing his memoirs (A Very Private School), published in March of this year, in which he details the loss of his virginity to a sex worker at age 12 and the traumatic physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a child in boarding school. He tells in the book that he was sexually abused by a nursing assistant at school when he was 11, whom in the book he refers to as a “master manipulator” who “touched him and kissed him.” “The effect of what he did to me was profound and immediate, awakening basic desires in me that had no place in someone so young. “This woman’s control over the hypnotized boys was total, because we were hungry for feminine warmth and desperate for her affection,” Spencer relates in the pages of his memoir.
He Daily Mail He also explains that the five years of writing that the count has spent on this memoir greatly affected him and pushed him to seek treatment for his traumas last year. In a March interview with People, Spencer opened up about how “supportive” Karen had been throughout her healing journey as she recalled the traumatic details of her childhood. “I think it was very challenging for her to have a husband who went through what was essentially four and a half years of deep therapy with very difficult nuances. And she supported the idea of me doing it,” she told the American publication. “I think she always hoped I would come out happier and healthier and that seems to be the case. Therefore, I am grateful to have her by my side while she went through this, which I now realize was an essential process,” she assured. Some words that less than three months later have remained almost a dead letter with the announcement of their separation.
Spencer has hired to negotiate the terms of her third divorce, for no less than 550 pounds an hour – about 650 euros – the same lawyer who managed to take the coveted title of Her Royal Highness from her sister Diana in her divorce with the then Prince Charles in 1996, as reported The Times. The lawyer is Fiona Shackleton (London, 67 years old), the so-called “steel magnolia” of the British legal industry, who has also completed high-profile divorces such as that of Paul McCartney and his second wife, Heather Mills. The reaction of both women to Shackleton’s incisive style was very different: while the former Princess of Wales sent her a huge bouquet of flowers and a thank-you card at the conclusion of the trial, Mills poured an entire jug of water on the lawyer’s head. water in the last session of their divorce, on March 17, 2008.
Shackleton also represented Prince Andrew during his divorce from Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, in May 1996. Andrew then paid three million pounds – 3.55 million euros – to have the services of the lawyer, one of the guests at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. Her relationship with the royal family is so close that in 2010 Queen Elizabeth II named her life baroness of Belgravia in Westminster, one of the wealthiest districts of London.
Charles Spencer has also not lost his relationship with his nephews after Diana’s death, at least with Henry. At the beginning of last May, when the Duke of Sussex visited London for a couple of days to mark 10 years of the Invictus Games, he did not meet his father, King Charles III, or his brother, Prince William, but Yes, he was able to join his mother’s brothers, Charles Spencer and Lady Jane Fellowes, to whom Henry of England greeted very affectionately and devoted much of his attention during the commemorative mass of the games in St. Paul’s Cathedral in the British capital. Also there were his cousins George McCorquodale, Ned Spencer and Louis Spencer, Viscount Althorp. However, there was no sign of the Windsors.
