Princess Diana had a lot of people on her bad side. Prince Charles, Camilla Parker Bowles, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip. The list of royals and public figures who earned her icy stare is long enough to fill a book (and several people have written those books). But when it came to pure, white-hot resentment that lasted for decades, one person stood above all the rest. And she wasn’t a royal at all.
The person Diana reportedly loathed more than anyone was her own stepmother, Raine Spencer. Called “the most hated person” in Diana’s life, Raine was a British socialite who married Diana’s father, John Spencer, the Earl Spencer, in 1976. Diana was 15 years old. And she never really forgave her for it, at least not for a very long time.
“Acid Raine” and the War That Started in Childhood
Diana didn’t quietly seethe. She went on the offensive almost immediately. Together with her brother Charles and her two older sisters, Jane and Sarah, the Spencer children made life miserable for their new stepmother. They invented the nickname “Acid Raine” and chanted “Raine, Raine, go away!” at her when they were all living on the family estate of Althorp in Northamptonshire, England.
According to royal watcher Ingrid Seward, all the Spencer children behaved terribly toward Raine. “They were purposely ganging up on her,” she said. But Diana took the lead. She described Raine as a “bully” and made no secret of the fact that she resented this woman for taking her father’s attention away from her.
To be fair, Raine didn’t exactly tiptoe around her new family. She moved into Althorp and started redecorating the place to her own taste, which included selling off family heirlooms to fund the refurbishment. Diana’s brother Charles, who later became the ninth Earl Spencer, once described his stepmother’s decorating sensibility as having “the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco.” When you’re a teenager watching your family treasures disappear from the walls, that kind of thing sticks with you.
Diana Pushed Her Down the Stairs
This feud wasn’t just nasty words behind closed doors. In September 1989, things got physical. Diana was 28 years old and staying at Althorp when she got into a confrontation with Raine. According to the Smithsonian Channel documentary “Princess Diana’s Wicked Stepmother,” Diana berated Raine and then pushed her so hard that she fell down a staircase.
Raine’s former personal assistant, Sue Howe, said in the documentary that Raine “was badly bruised and was dreadfully upset. It was a cruel and heartless thing to do.” That’s not a catty remark at a dinner table. That’s a real, violent confrontation between a princess and her stepmother. And it gives you a sense of just how deep Diana’s anger ran.
Royal biographer Penny Junor called the dynamic between them “pretty full-on war.” As Diana’s own marriage to Prince Charles started falling apart, she used Raine as an outlet for her frustration and rage. The princess was unhappy in her marriage from almost the beginning, and Raine was an easy, familiar target.
The Wedding Seating That Said Everything
If you want to know how petty royal feuds can get, look at what happened on July 29, 1981, the day Diana married Prince Charles at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was watched by 750 million people around the world. It was supposed to be a fairy tale. And Diana used it to send a message.
She made sure her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, was seated at the front of the cathedral. Raine, meanwhile, was banished to the back rows. While Diana’s father and other family members sat across from the Royal Family, Raine was stuck in the general congregation. She wasn’t even allowed on the Buckingham Palace balcony after the ceremony. On the biggest day of Diana’s life, seen by hundreds of millions, she made sure everyone knew exactly where Raine stood.
The Day Diana Threw Raine’s Clothes in Garbage Bags
Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, died on March 29, 1992. It was the same year Diana and Charles formally separated, so she was already going through a terrible time. But grief didn’t soften her feelings toward Raine. Not even a little.
Just two days after her father’s death, Diana’s brother, the new Earl Spencer, threw Raine out of Althorp. She wasn’t allowed to take anything unless she could prove it was hers. But the real kicker is what Diana did with Raine’s clothes.
According to historical accounts, Diana personally stood guard in the Spencer bedroom and watched as a maid packed Raine’s extensive wardrobe into four Louis Vuitton suitcases. Then Diana noticed the suitcases had the embossed capital letter “S” on them. She decided those also belonged to the Spencers. So the maid had to unpack everything and stuff Raine’s designer clothes into black garbage bags instead. Diana’s brother then kicked all the garbage bags down the stairs.
“That woman is ex. She is no longer my stepmother,” Diana reportedly said. If that doesn’t give you a clear picture of how deep this grudge went, nothing will.
Diana Had Plenty of Other People She Didn’t Like Either
The thing about Diana is that while Raine was enemy number one, the list didn’t stop there. She had a truly complicated relationship with the Queen Mother, who she once called “the chief leper in the leper colony.” That’s a wild thing to say about your husband’s grandmother, but Diana said it.
The Queen Mother apparently couldn’t understand how Diana had so much freedom as a royal without any repercussions. According to royal biographer Christopher Wilson, she used her influence to isolate Diana from other family members. Diana kept her distance, describing events hosted by the Queen Mother as stiff and overly formal.
Then there was Camilla Parker Bowles, whom Diana nicknamed “The Rottweiler” because, as Diana’s friend Simone Simmons wrote, “once she has got her teeth into someone she won’t let go.” Princess Anne disliked Diana from the start and didn’t bother hiding it. Prince Philip sent Diana a letter blaming her “unpredictable behavior” for driving Charles toward Camilla. By the end of her life, Diana had also fallen out with her own mother, her brother, and even Elton John (though she and Elton patched things up just weeks before her death in August 1997).
The Part Nobody Expected: Diana and Raine Became Friends
Here’s where the story takes a turn that would feel too convenient for a movie script, except it actually happened.
In the mid-1990s, after decades of open hostility, Diana reached out to Raine. She invited her stepmother to lunch at Kensington Palace. It was completely unexpected. But Diana was in a different place by then. Her marriage was over. Her relationship with her own mother, Frances, had collapsed. She hadn’t spoken to Frances in the four months leading up to her death. She was estranged from much of the royal family. She needed someone.
And the person she turned to was the woman she’d tormented for 20 years.
Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, explained it simply: “In the end, Diana was an outcast and Raine was an outcast too, so they became great friends.” Both women had grown up in aristocratic families that fell apart. Both had gone through ugly divorces. Both knew what it felt like to be on the outside looking in.
Raine began playing a mother figure in Diana’s life. The two started meeting for heart-to-heart lunches at places like the Connaught Grill in London. Diana would come over to Raine’s place, sit on her sofa, and talk about her troubles. They were spotted shopping and lunching together in public.
Raine later recalled, “Diana was a lovely person. She had incredibly heavy pressures put upon her, but we ended up huge friends. She used to come and sit on my sofa and tell me her troubles.” At Diana’s inquest years later, Raine explained why she thought the friendship finally worked: “She always said I had no hidden agenda. So many people, because she was so popular and so world famous, wanted something out of her.”
The Irony of It All
There’s something almost cruel about this story. Diana spent most of her life hating someone who turned out to be one of the few people she could actually trust. Raine wasn’t part of the royal machine. She didn’t need anything from Diana. She had no agenda. And in a world where almost everyone around Diana seemed to want something from her, that mattered.
Burrell summed it up: “In the beginning, of course, she was very much hated, and at the end of the Princess’ life, she was very much loved.”
Raine attended Diana’s funeral in 1997 alone and, by all accounts, was genuinely devastated. She went on to live until 2016, dying at age 87. By then, she had outlived the stepdaughter who once pushed her down the stairs, chanted schoolyard taunts at her, and stuffed her clothes into trash bags on one of the worst days of her life. And yet somehow, the final chapter of their relationship was one of real affection.
That’s the kind of twist that reminds you real life is stranger, and messier, than any fairy tale the tabloids could write.
