A videotape of the late princess Diana talking frankly about her sex life with Prince Charles and suggesting that a lover on her royal staff was "bumped off" was broadcast on US television late Monday. The NBC network aired the tapes recorded between 1992 and 1993 by her voice coach Peter Settelen, who reportedly sold them to NBC after a legal tussle with Diana's family.
In the tapes Diana recounts how she fell in love with a member of her palace staff, presumed to be royal policeman Barry Mannakee, who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1987.
"It was all found out and he was chucked out. And then he was killed," she says. "And that was the biggest blow of my life, I must say. And I think he was bumped off."
Diana speaks candidly of her ill-fated marriage with the heir to the British crown, Prince Charles, saying she only met him 13 times before their wedding.
"He wasn't consistent with his courting abilities. He'd ring me up every day for a week, and then he wouldn't speak to me for three weeks. Very odd."
Once married, Diana noted that their sex life was limited.
"There was never a requirement for it from him," the princess says. "Once every three weeks about, and I kept thinking it followed a pattern.
"He used to see his lady once every three weeks before we got married," she says, in a reference to the prince's lover and current companion, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Diana also recalls how, on learning that her husband was still conducting an affair with Parker-Bowles, she confronted Queen Elizabeth II over the issue in 1986.
"I went to the Top Lady, and I'm sobbing. And I said, 'What do I do? I'm coming to you. What do I do?'" she says.
"And she said, 'I don't know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.' And that was it. That was help!"
Diana worked with Settelen for 16 months, training for more than 120 hours, and writing and rehearsing more than a dozen speeches, including a passionate talk about bulimia widely regarded to be her most successful public address. The video was recorded as part of Settelen's method of interviewing his clients.
NBC said the tapes, "recorded in Diana's living room, hidden for years after her death, and fought over for months in the British courts, offer a view of the princess quite different from the formal public face she usually put forth."