Princess Diana said she was seen as a "threat" by Camilla Parker-Bowles when they first met in 1980.- "I was a very young girl but I was a threat," Diana said in secretly recorded tapes.
- The tapes were used as material for the 1992 book "Diana: Her True Story."
Princess Diana said she was a "threat" to Camilla Parker-Bowles from their first meeting.
Speaking in secretly-recorded interviews in 1991 for her biography, "Diana: Her True Story" by Andrew Morton, the Princess of Wales opened up about her relationship with the Duchess of Cornwall.
Read more: Princess Diana reportedly compared the country home she shared with Prince Charles to a prison
A revised version of the book, titled "Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words," published in 2017, features quotes from the recorded sessions.
"[I met her] very early on. I was introduced to the circle, but I was a threat. I was a very young girl but I was a threat," Diana said.
Diana was 19 when she got engaged to Prince Charles in 1981. Camilla was 33 at the time, and married to Andrew-Parker Bowles. The prince was 32.
"We always had discussions about Camilla though," she added. "I once heard him on the telephone in his bath on his hand-held set saying: 'Whatever happens, I will always love you.' I told him afterwards that I had listened at the door and we had a filthy row."
The princess went on to describe a lunch meeting she had with Camilla after her engagement to Prince Charles, where Camilla asked if Diana planned to hunt with her new fiancé.
"So we had lunch. Very tricky indeed. She said: 'You are not going to hunt are you?'" Diana recalled.
"She said: 'Horse. You are not going to hunt when you go and live at Highgrove are you?' I said: 'No.' She said: 'I just wanted to know,' and I thought as far as she was concerned that was her communication route. Still too immature to understand all the messages coming my way," she added.
Camilla and Charles were known to enjoy hunting together, and so the question was possibly her way of making sure she wouldn't be replaced in that aspect of the prince's life.
The lunch meeting was shown in a season four episode of "The Crown," although the scene doesn't include the conversation mentioned by Diana in the book.
Despite the various details Diana gave Morton about Charles and Camilla's relationship, he said he was informed by a libel lawyer that he wouldn't be able to write that they were having an affair in the book, which was published in 1992.
"Much to Diana's annoyance, and in spite of overwhelming evidence, I wasn't at the time able to write that Prince Charles and
The affair is something Charles admitted to in 1994, saying in an interview that he had remained faithful until the relationship with Diana "became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried."