LONDON — She was collateral damage in one of the most sensational news stories in British TV history, a royal nanny for Prince William and Prince Harry who was sullied by the BBC in her quest to interview their mother, Princess Diana.
On Thursday, the BBC apologized to former nanny, Alexandra Pettifer, then known as Tiggy Legge-Bourke, for spreading false allegations that she had an affair with Prince Charles and had an abortion after becoming pregnant with his child. . The BBC also agreed to pay her a substantial, if undisclosed, amount in damages.
“These allegations are fabricated,” Ms Pettifer’s lawyer Louise Prince read in a jointly agreed statement in the High Court in London.
The BBC said in the statement that it was “extremely sorry for the serious and long-lasting damage” caused to Ms Pettifer, and that they were “wholly unfounded” and “should never have been raised”.
Ms Pettifer, 57, became a gruesome footnote in Charles and Diana’s soap opera life when an ambitious young BBC journalist, Martin Bashir, began spreading reports of her alleged sexual entanglement with Charles, apparently as a way of gaining Diana’s trust. to win. she would give him an exclusive tell-all interview.
Bashir also told Diana that people close to her were selling stories about her to the London tabloids, and he made fake bank statements to undermine a rival news organization. These underhanded methods landed Mr Bashir the interview for the BBC’s “Panorama” in 1995, which turned out to be just as big a bombshell as the interview Harry and his wife, Meghan, gave to Oprah Winfrey in March 2021.
“There were three of us in this marriage,” Diana famously told Mr. Bashir of her husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles, whom he was in a relationship with before and during his marriage, and whom he later married.
The program has since become a festering source of embarrassment and expense to the BBC. The broadcaster has apologized to the royal family, paid compensation to other people discredited by this and promised never to broadcast it again.
Shortly after the interview aired, questions were raised about Mr Bashir’s tactics, most vocally by Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer. An internal investigation by the BBC exonerated Mr Bashir, but in 2021 an investigation conducted by a former UK Supreme Court judge, Lord John Dyson, concluded that “the BBC failed to meet the high standards of integrity and transparency that its characteristic.”
On Thursday, the BBC’s director-general, Tim Davie, issued another apology to the royal family, as well as a new one to Ms Pettifer.
“It is deeply regrettable that the BBC did not come to the facts immediately after the programme, when there were warning signs that the interview may have been obtained inappropriately,” said Mr Davie. “Had we done our job right, Princess Diana would have known the truth in her lifetime.”
The BBC, Davie repeated, will never broadcast or license the program to other broadcasters again. Because of its historical value, he did not rule out the broadcasting of excerpts from the interview.
Mr Bashir, who went on to report for ABC News and returned to the BBC as a religion correspondent, resigned from the broadcaster in May 2021 due to ill health. He has expressed regret for his methods, but insisted that they ultimately played no part in getting Diana for the interview.
mrs. Pettifer was part of a changing cast of characters in the incessant tabloid coverage of Charles and Diana. The daughter of a wealthy banker who served with Royal Horse Guards, she grew up in an aristocratic world of Swiss finishing schools and an ancestral estate in Wales, and later opened a kindergarten. Charles hired her as a nanny for his sons shortly after he and Diana split in 1993.
Newspapers jumped on rumors that Diana objected to Ms. Pettifer’s childcare practices—she smoked while caring for William and Harry—and passed second-hand accounts of her views on what the young princes really needed (“fresh air , a gun and a horse”), The Guardian reported in 1999.
But there was never any confirmation of the rumors that the nanny had become involved with the boys’ father.
In 1999, she resigned from Prince Charles’ household and married Charles Pettifer, a former officer in the Coldstream Guards. William and Harry, who were said to be fond of her, attended their wedding.
In a statement published by The Sunday Times, Ms Pettifer said: “I am disappointed that legal action was required for the BBC to acknowledge the serious damage I have suffered.” She said she knew “firsthand” how much the Diana interview had affected the royal family and that their distress “is a source of great annoyance to me”.