Princess Diana had a contentious relationship with her stepmother, Countess Raine Spencer, and one day her anger boiled over and she pushed her so hard she fell down the stairs, according to a new documentary.
The incident took place in September 1989, when a 28-year-old Diana was still living at her childhood home Althorp House in Northamptonshire. Raine had been married to Diana's father, Johnnie. for 13 years and over that time Diana's relationship with her "wicked" stepmother grew increasingly strained, the New York Post reported. Then she reportedly shoved Raine down the stairs.
The countess' former personal assistant, Sue Howe, recalled how "badly bruised" and "dreadfully upset" Raine was. "It was a cruel and heartless thing to do," Howe said in a documentary "Princess Diana's 'Wicked' Stepmother,'" which airs Monday on the Smithsonian Channel.
Diana was 11 when her father first began dating Raine but the two never formed a close bond. In fact, Showbiz Cheat Sheet reported that Diana and her siblings often taunted their stepmother.
"All the Spencer children behaved very badly to Raine, royal biographer Ingrid Seward said, per the news site. "They were purposely ganging up on her."
Fueling tensions, the countess allegedly refused to let Diana and her siblings see their father after he suffered a stroke in 1979, New York Post reported. When he did eventually die in 1992 Raine's stepchildren asked her to leave Althorp. She and Diana did later reconcile though and the two were even spotted out in public together on several occasions.
Diana died in a car accident in 1997 and Raine passed away after a battle with cancer in 2016 but as the Princess of Wales former butler Paul Burrell told the Post, both women were "survivors" who "suffered adversity and tragedy which brought them together in the end."
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