Princess Diana Doubly Victimized by Family Court: As a Child & Mother

Latest in Our "History of the Custody Crisis" Series

Princess Diana was doubly victimized by Family Court, both as a child and as a mother. She was undeniably the most famous woman in the world during her time.

Her victimization shows that it does not matter how wealthy, titled, or famous you are, Family Court can and does empower men to take children away from mothers and keep them away if they so choose.

Diana’s story is the latest in our History of the Crisis series where we attempt to clarify that the Custody Crisis is not just a recent phenomenon caused by certain laws and policies in particular jurisdictions. It goes way back…and there is only one common denominator.

The first in the series chronologically is Caroline’s from the early 1800’s and then we skip forward to the 1970’s after the Women’s Liberation movement enabled a torrent of divorce cases. Diana’s experience as a child comes at the beginning of Women’s Lib in the late 1960’s, so it is the first in the modern-day incarnation of the Crisis. And it is the first case in which a woman has been victimized both as a child and as a mother.

In every Custody Crisis case, there are at least two victims—the mother and the child(ren). Diana, unfortunately, suffered on both ends. As a child, she was a victim of Family Court when a judge switched custody from her primary nurturing mother to her absent father, and then, as a mother, when she was restricted to seeing her boys only half time, despite being their primary bond and caregiver.

Because of her experience with Family Court as a child, Diana as a mother knew she was at risk of losing her children, so she cleverly devised an elaborate plan to stop that from happening.

Virtually everyone on the planet knew and loved Diana. But few, to this day, know she was victimized either as a child or as an adult by Family Court.

Here is the part of Diana’s story that has never been told.

DIANA: CHILD VICTIM

Diana was born in 1961 to wealthy, aristocratic, titled, and Royalty-adjacent parents. She knew she was “supposed to be a boy”. Her mother was perceived as having failed her husband by giving birth to a third girl when a male heir was needed to carry on the Spencer name.

Her mother, Frances, was made to undergo medical tests to see what was wrong with her, a form of mother-blame—kind of ironic since it is the male sperm that actually determines gender. But a few years later, her mother would birth a boy, Diana’s cherished little brother, Charles (now Earl Spencer).

The family of six lived in Frances’ sprawling estate in the country, northeast of London.

It was a beautiful setting for a childhood, but Diana’s father, Johnny, was emotionally and physically abusive to Frances. Diana witnessed the abuse and saw her father hit her mother in the face.

I remember seeing my father slap my mother across the face. I was hiding behind the door and mummy was crying.

When a man abuses his wife, he is abusing his children.

When Diana was six and her brother three, Frances had had enough and decided to divorce. She wanted to protect her children as well as herself. Her older daughters were away at boarding school, a given for children of the aristocracy.

It was the summer of 1967. Diana was 6-years-old, Charles 3, when her mother finally left. Frances took her and her siblings to live in London, although their home was Frances’ family home.

Frances took the kids to London but they would visit their father. It is not clear whether she had an affair before she told Johnny she wanted a divorce or after. Either way, Johnny was angry. And like so many men decided to use the kids to get his revenge.

That Christmas, when the kids were visiting their father, Johnny refused to return them to her. Frances was really upset, Diana too. Diana has a vivid memory of watching her mother leave and her footsteps crunching on the gravel as she walked away.

Diana and her little brother suffered greatly from the loss of their mother. Diana remembers Charles sobbing at night, crying out for his mother.

I want my mummy, I want my mummy…

The vindictive father couldn’t care less about the trauma he was inflicting on his children. He was getting his revenge. He would hire nannies to care for them, even though Frances wanted to.

The loss of her mother left an indelible mark on Diana.

DIANA’S MOTHER’S CUSTODY BATTLE

Diana remembers the judge was supposed to come and ask her where she wanted to live, but he never came.

I remember there being a great discussion that a judge was going to come to me at [her school] and ask who would I prefer to live with. The judge never turned up…

How convenient. If the judge does not ask, he does not need to give a reason for overriding the children’s preference to live with their mother. That was Diana’s first clue that things were not right in the court system, something that would prepare her for her own battle for her kids.

It also helped her relate to other people who had family problems.

The divorce helped me to relate to anyone else who is upset in their family life…

The custody trial was highly publicized. Frances was villainized with the narrative that she had broken up the family by leaving Johnny.

Johnny was given sole custody. Frances was placed on supervised visits for a while, but never saw her children much after that. This negatively impacted Diana’s relationship with her mother for the rest of her life.

The press largely reported Frances lost custody because her own mother (Diana’s grandmother) testified against her at trial, saying she was a bad mother for having left her husband.

But the truth is, she would have lost anyway.

DIANA: VICTIMIZED AS A MOTHER

The week Diana got engaged to Prince Charles, he called her “chubby”. That was when she says she developed bulimia.

A few days before their wedding ceremony in 1981, watched by an unsurpassed record of 750 million people, Diana found out Charles had a girlfriend on the side. She hoped he would end the affair after their marriage.

That did not happen, as she famously quipped a decade later that the marriage was a bit crowded.

Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.

Diana gave birth to William in 1982 and Harry in 1984. She had done her Royal job. She produced an heir and a spare.

Charles felt free to carry on with his affair with Camila. Diana would eventually react to his infidelity by having her own affair(s). Perhaps she thought that would get Charles to stop his more serious, long-term affair. It did not.

By the early ‘90’s, Diana was miserable in the marriage and contemplated divorce. This, of course was unheard of for a wife in the Royal Family [RF].

Although Diana wanted out, she was terrified of losing her children after what had happened to her mother. She knew her boys were considered the property of their father and the Crown, so she was doubly outmatched. She knew she could cease to have a part in her boys’ live if they chose to punish her for leaving.

Diana’s children were everything to her and she would not be able to bear losing them.

Diana’s #1 priority is maintaining custody of her boys.

Having been victimized in Family Court as a child, she knew she was up against the system as well as Charles—something most women don’t realize until it is too late.

Diana knew that she would be villainized, just as her mother had been. She knew her struggles with bulimia and her affairs would used and anything else they could dredge up or fabricate to show she was “mad” and “bad”. And that the judge would use those things to justify giving Charles custody.

She also knew the British press would publicize their side of the story, that they were in cahoots. She had to outsmart them all: Charles, the Royal Family and the press or she could be destroyed and lose her children.

So Diana hatched a clever plan.

She convinced an author to write a book with “Her True Story”. She secretly fed him information about her marriage and her life under the monarchy. This would preemptively get the truth out before false narratives and lies about her could be disseminated to the public and used against her in court.

Amazingly, even though nearly every move of hers was monitored by the RF, she managed to stealthily get her story to Andrew Morton, who kept it under wraps.

The book, Diana: Her True Story was published in 1992 to the shock of Charles and the entire Royal Family, as well as mainstream media and the public.

She had caught them all off guard!

THE BATTLE OF THE WALESES

The Royal custody fight was labeled “The Battle of the Waleses”, since it was between the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Predictably, Charles and his supporters denied Diana’s assertions that he had been having an affair. They claimed she was delusional. They said she was mentally ill, citing “mood swings” and bulimia.

They go for the absolute oldest strategy in the book—she’s mad.

Charles’ supporters accused Diana of somehow being delusional because she’d had an eating disorder. Bulimia and madness are not the same thing.

That backfired. Diana was ready.

She launched a campaign that enlightened the public about how bulimia is a result of needing control in one’s life and distracting from life’s painful issues. This implied that her marriage to Charles had caused her pain and to feel a loss of control over her life and, thus, her eating disorder.

Charles’ supporters claimed she was “distorting the truth” which is essentially calling her a liar. They said that her accusations of an affair with Camila were unhinged and deranged and that she was paranoid, obsessed.

It’s chilling to see the determination to blacken, to smear Diana. There is no depth they wouldn’t stoop to.

It looked like what it was—vindictive, spiteful, and petty.

Both bases were covered: she’s being accused of being both mad and bad.

But Diana’s brilliant gamble had worked: going public with her side of the story first caused people to largely sided with her, not Charles or the Royal Family. This was her “soft power”, which she yielded to great effect.

Diana expressed her great hope that Charles would just “go off with his lady” and leave the children with her. She felt she could then “do this job [of parenting] so much better” on her own and not “feel trapped” while doing so.

Diana’s very existence remained a threat to the Royal Family and they continued to undermine her reputation in whatever ways they could. So Diana gave her first solo interview in 1995, watched by 70 million, labeled a “bombshell”.

Diana said in the interview that she would not go quietly, that she would fight to the end, implying for her children. That is when she told of her marriage to Charles being “crowded”. Tapes later emerged proving Charles’ infidelity, and he admitted it, which shifted support even more strongly to Diana.

By the time the divorce was finalized in 1995, William and Harry were 13 and 11. Diana was then only allowed to see her children half time despite being their primary bond and caregiver until then.

As for her boys. They are victims too. Three generations of Family Court victims.

There is no doubt the boys would have rather lived primarily with Diana and visited their father. But they were not asked and it did not matter anyway. They were, at least in practice, their father’s property.

It is unclear how much of a negative impact this change had on them.

Diana’s well-executed plan had worked! They could not keep her from her beloved boys.

Unfortunately, she was not able to benefit from her brave strategy for keeping her boys for long. Just two short years later, in 1997, she tragically passed away following a car crash.

The silver lining is that William and Harry had their mother in their lives until they were 15 and 13, even if only half time at the end, thanks to Diana’s amazing courage and tenacity—going up against not only her ex-husband, but the most powerful institution on the planet.

RIP Diana

TAKEAWAYS

The most salient takeaway from Diana’s story is how dangerous and damaging Family Court is for both women and children, and how long it has been victimizing them. It is not a recent phenomenon.

Diana was scarred by losing her mother and terrified of losing her children.

As a child, sole custody was granted to Diana’s father, who kept her away from her mother, causing great distress to her mother, her brother, and her and haunted her throughout her life. She was always terrified she would lose her own children.

As a mother, Diana lost her status as primary caregiver, despite the fact she had been her children’s primary bond and caregiver their entire childhoods. The only reason she was able to keep half custody was she knew the drill and devised a plan that would ensure she would not lose them.

Another takeaway is that the court ruling was euphemistically identified as “shared parenting”, but it was more accurately “equal parenting”. That means the children are forced to go back and forth equal time between their parents, regardless of with whom they are primarily bonded or who was their primary caregiver. This is not in children’s best interest, regardless of the Old Boy narrative that seems to prevail.

Men have used children as leverage to control wives forever. This is enabled in the 3rd millennium via family courts. That is the function of the Family Court system—to keep men entitled and empowered over “their” women and children after divorce.

Diana’s case is a good example of why victims of the Custody Crisis (and their advocates) need to help other mothers understand that Family Court is rigged against women. This may not help them keep custody, but at least they will be psychologically prepared and not place blame on themselves for losing custody.

Join The Women’s Coalition to fight for the power to keep & protect our children!

NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, all columns are written by me—Cindy Dumas, M.A. My children and I are victims of the Custody Crisis. A judge knowingly gave custody to the child molester father who continued his sexual abuse, causing us to have to flee into hiding. A brief recap of my story here: savingdamon.com.

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IN OTHER NEWS

THE SECOND PART OF CHAPTER IS OUT!

CHAPTER 26 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother is “The Overture”. [This chapter is too long for a newsletter so it will be posted in parts. The first is here.]

In this second part of Chapter 26, Legion realizes that Herry intends to get sole custody and take the boys away from her. He has submitted his initial Plaintiff’s Declaration and it is chock full of lies. And things don’t portend well as she discovers the judge had his ex-wife committed to a mental institution and replaced her with a stepmother to do the work of raising their four children.

This judge does the usual: appoints an insider “custody evaluator” whom he can count on. Legion regrets having been so naïve as to have told this court lackey the truth about some previous difficulties in her life which she could spin against her. She is incensed that Herry’s and the evaluator’s “testimony” are automatically considered facts and evidence and there is no fact-checking whatsoever in Family Court. What she does not yet realize yet is that all these lies about her don’t really matter in the end. The judge already knows what he is going to do. They just give him cover.

Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression and violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.

Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday and subscribers will find them in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!

TEASERS

And now?  Now you’re gonna take them all from me?!  I’m the one who’s pissed you off! but soooo without the supporting backing and the money and, most certainly, without any maleness and pillaredness to fight you.  How fucking dare you?! How mother‑fucking dare you?!

…Get them said or get them written down and properly court‑handled and, voila,—depending upon who you are (this is the crux),—your statements become accountable—they become Truth—because they are now testimony under oath that the State and its implementer, daJudge, both reckon as evidence.

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