After claiming that she suffered a breakdown in an American magazine yesterday, the Duchess of York has clarified some of her comments. They included labelling the Duke of Edinburgh as “very frightening”, revealing that her marriage had started to go wrong just one week after the wedding, and saying that she had probably been clinically depressed.
HELLO! and BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond spoke to Sarah after the interview, published in Rosie O’Donnell’s magazine, Rosie, hit the newsstands. In it, the flame-haired divorcee said: “I had out-of-control debts, an out-of –control lifestyle that I couldn’t keep up any more. I’d now ruined my marriage.”
Sarah and Andrew’s problems started, claimed the Duchess in Rosie, just after their July 1986 state wedding. “I’d been working in London and living in a small flat with my best friend and suddenly I married a prince and was on the public stage,” she said. “Look, when I married Andrew I was told I could go and live in the ports with him, wherever he was. But one week after we got married, the Duke of Edinburgh said: “No you can’t. No, you stay in London and Andrew you go to the port. Because there’s no security.”
Jennie Bond, one of the most high-profile court correspondents in Britain, went on BBC radio yesterday to explain what the Duchess had meant in the interview. Sarah, she claimed, had only said that she was clinically depressed because she wasn’t exactly sure what the interviewer meant. “Look Jenny, what is clinical depression? I don’t know what it is, so when I was asked that I said, ‘probably,’ but I certainly didn’t take any medication,” the Duchess said. It was “absolute nonsense,” she continued, that she had suffered a nervous breakdown, but “Yes, I probably had a breakdown. I was broken-down and miserable – my marriage was breaking up.”
Sarah also attempted to clear up her comments on Prince Philip, admitting that “frightening” was not a well-chosen word to have used in reference to him. “Sarah had been told that she would be able to travel with her husband after they were married,” said Jennie. “What she meant was that she was isolated in Buckingham Palace, and she found that very frightening, not the Duke of Edinburgh.”
“The Duchess feels very frustrated and nervous about the headlines generated from the interview,” the HELLO! royal correspondent continued. “She would recognise that she needs to choose her words very carefully – she thought she was just doing an interview for WeightWatchers. ‘I do not want this to be portrayed as an attack on the Duke of Edinburgh,’ said Sarah. ‘I have a lot of respect for him.’”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
