A source familiar with the Spencer family claimed to Radar: “Diana was scarred by what happened with her father. She had already experienced the breakup of her parents’ marriage as a little girl, and then her father secretly marrying another woman added another layer of hurt and instability.
“Discovering something so important about your own family through a newspaper rather than hearing it from your father was enormously painful. For Diana, it wasn’t simply that John had remarried – it was the secrecy and the feeling that the children had been excluded from something that would fundamentally change their lives.
“Her reaction shows the depth of that hurt. Diana striking her father was completely out of character in terms of her relationship with her parents, but she felt she was standing up not only for herself but for Sarah, Jane and Charles as well.”
The insider claimed, “It left Diana with emotional scars. She wanted security, loyalty and a close family enormously, and experiences like this during her formative years inevitably shaped the way she thought about relationships and family life later on.
“Raine’s arrival also created another deeply complicated relationship within a family that had already been through considerable upheaval.
“The Spencer children resented her intensely, and Diana carried much of that anger for years.”
They added, “Charles’ account makes clear that behind the privilege and grandeur of Althorp there was a family experiencing very ordinary human pain. Diana may have grown up surrounded by wealth and history, but that didn’t protect her from feeling rejected or betrayed.
“The irony is that Diana and Raine eventually managed to find some peace with one another. But reconciliation later in life doesn’t erase what Diana experienced as a teenager or how profoundly her father’s secret marriage affected her at the time.”