King Charles accused of gaslighting by Princess Dianas brother in dispute over book claims

Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, has accused King Charles of “gaslighting” him after Buckingham Palace pushed back at his claims about the monarch’s conduct.Buckingham Palace released an unusually forceful statement Wednesday ahead of the release of a memoir by Spencer, which charts the breakdown of then-Prince Charles’s marriage to Princess Diana, and the fallout from her death in a Paris car crash in 1997, one year after the royal couple finalized their divorce.In an initial excerpt released ahead of publication, Spencer recalled a heated phone call with Charles amid a disagreement about funeral arrangements, claiming that a furious Charles had told him Diana would “soon be forgotten.”“While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss,” the palace had responded.In an interview with Britain’s Mail on Sunday newspaper, Spencer said: “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the king.”“It was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I’d lied without the king being able to deny what I’d said,” Spencer added.“Gaslighting” is a form of manipulation where the manipulator is trying to get someone to question their own reality, memory or perceptions.Spencer also denied he was motivated by money in publishing the book, saying it “has never even been the remotest consideration” and stressing that “my primary responsibility as a historian is to tell the truth.”The aristocrat, an earl whose family has generational ties with Britain’s royal family, has made a number of other allegations in excerpts since released from the book, published in advance by the Daily Mail newspaper.In the excerpts, Spencer writes that Charles sounded “giddily elated” and “like a lottery winne...