Charles, the Earl Spencer, is headed for his third divorce. The Earl Spencer has not had a lot of luck in love, nor does he sound like he’s an engaged father to his brood of six kids. While I also love that the Earl Spencer has shown a lot of support for Prince Harry and Meghan, make no mistake, his personal life is MESSY. Some background: he was married to his first wife Victoria Lockwood from 1989 through 1997. His second marriage was to Caroline Freud, from 2001-2009. He met his third wife Karen Gordon in 2010 and they were married in 2011. So this was his longest marriage. According to the Mail, the marriage fell apart as he wrote his memoir, in which he wrote about being savagely abused at boarding school and how that abuse has larger repercussions for him to this day.
Charles Spencer and his third wife are divorcing, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. The Earl’s relationship with the Countess of Spencer broke down amid the strain of writing his harrowing memoir detailing the physical and sexual abuse he suffered at boarding school, it is understood.
The couple announced their pending divorce to staff at Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire, in March.
‘It is immensely sad,’ Earl Spencer told the MoS last night. ‘I just want to devote myself to all my children, and to my grandchildren, and I wish Karen every happiness in the future.’
Earl Spencer and Karen Gordon, a Canadian philanthropist, married in June 2011 within the grounds of Althorp, where the Earl’s older sister Princess Diana is buried. The couple had met the previous year on a blind date at a restaurant in Los Angeles.
Speaking to The Sunday Times in 2020, the Earl said: ‘Karen and I both appreciate what the other does and look after what we have. Neither of us has found happiness like this before.’
His wife was notable by her absence at events held at Althorp and Spencer House in London in mid-March to launch the Earl’s book, A Very Private School. Charles Spencer told the MoS that the five years of work on his memoir has deeply affected him and led to him undergoing residential treatment for trauma late last year. He is understood to have been particularly traumatised by his discovery of his 1976 schoolboy diary, in which the assistant matron, who he alleges sexually abused him, had written a long-forgotten message. The diary was discovered on the high shelf of a room at Althorp that was being refurbished after he completed the main body of his book.
I buy that writing the memoir changed him and I’m glad he’s in therapy now. I also buy that it changed his marriage and there’s work he needs to do on himself, separate from his now-estranged wife. It doesn’t sound like there’s some affair or marriage scandal happening here, although we are talking about the British aristocracy, so who knows. Anyway, I hope the Earl is okay and I hope Karen is too.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.