Charles Spencer, the younger brother of the late Princess Diana, is getting divorced from his wife Karen Spencer.
The 9th Earl Spencer, 60, announced the split to the Daily Mail on Saturday.
“It is immensely sad,” Charles said.
“I just want to devote myself to all my children, and to my grandchildren, and I wish Karen every happiness in the future,” he added.
According to the Daily Mail, Charles and Karen, 52, are divorcing partly because of “the strain” it took on Charles writing about the physical and sexual abuse he experienced at boarding school in his memoir, “A Very Private School.”
Charles and Karen were married since June 2011.
Their wedding took place at Althorp House in Great Barington, England, two months after Prince William and Kate Middleton’s royal wedding.
They have a 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte Diana.
Karen has two other daughters from her previous marriage to Hollywood producer Mark Gordon, while Charles has six children from his first two marriages to Victoria Lockwood and Caroline Freud.
In his memoir that came out in March, Charles revealed that he was sexually abused as a child while attending Maidwell Hall, an elite English boarding school.
He said that he made the revelation for the first time to a therapist.
“I whispered to him that I was sexually abused as a child by an adult. And I remember him looking so shocked, and he had heard it all,” Charles wrote.
“Afterward, he took me aside and said, ‘This is very serious stuff.’ “
The father of seven continued: “By that stage, I had children. I suddenly put it into context. What if one of my children of either gender had been subjected to this as an 11-year-old? It made my blood boil. I then started to allow myself to feel the full devastation of what had happened to me.”
Charles claimed that his parents “had no idea of the level of cruelty and perversion” that he dealt with at the school.
“They would never have sent me there,” he said. “I think they probably had an old-fashioned view that corporal punishment, the beatings, would probably be part of the school. But they were such a ritual part of every day. There were 72 boys and at least a half dozen of us would be beaten every day. Your time came around very quickly. I don’t think the parents had any knowledge of that.”
In the memoir, Charles also opened up about his late sister, who died at 36 years old from injuries she sustained in a car crash in 1997.
“She was the closest person to me growing up,” he said. “We had two much older sisters and a baby brother who had died. Then there was Diana and me. We were very close.”
“And, actually, that was one of the devastations of being sent away,” he added. “She was sent a year ahead of me, but for the first few years of my life, we went everywhere together.”
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