CNN Audio Premieres "When Diana Met..." Podcast

 CNN AUDIO PREMIERES NEW PODCAST WHEN DIANA MET… HOSTED BY AMINATOU SOW

CNN Audio today debuted its first episode of When Diana Met… -- a new limited-series podcast hosted by longtime podcaster Aminatou Sow. 

When Diana Met… takes listeners inside Princess Diana’s most notable meetings with public figures, politicians, dignitaries, and celebrities to reveal often-overlooked truths and misunderstandings about her life as Princess of Wales.

In the first episode, Aminatou goes behind-the-scenes with royal biographer Andrew Morton for an inside look at Princess Diana’s first lunch with Camilla Parker Bowles. Morton first learned of this meeting through secret recordings from Diana herself. Aminatou also chats with her friend Candice Carty-Williams about why she will always stan Diana, and why she even turned down an invitation to Buckingham Palace.

When Diana Met… is the story of Diana as you’ve never heard it. Listen to Episode 1 on CNN Audio or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.

Key moments from the episode:
 

 AMINATOU SOW INTRO: for the purposes of this particular podcast, I am a Princess Diana obsessive. And this is something that I hear over and over again from a lot of Black women in the diaspora that are my age, mid-30s. It's something that we have inherited from our mothers.

Thinking about Diana is a way to stay connected to my mom who died over 16 years ago at this point, and it makes me feel closer to her. But it's also true that a lot of my work deals with demystifying power.

**

SOW: So yes, this is a show about Diana Spencer, the royal, the mother, the fashion icon, the philanthropist, but it really is a show about us.

What our perceptions of her say about us. I mean I certainly didn't know her. I've never met her. Very few people who speak about her publicly, it turns out, knew her privately. She died at 36 and she's frozen in time.

We do not allow for dead people to be three dimensional characters. And in her particular case, there was just no way she wasn't going to be instantly beatified.

I find it baffling, I find it curious, but ultimately it is just so predictably human. I am really looking forward to speaking to other smart people who can offer their own personal and professional takes on why Diana embodied so many different things to so many different people.


Diana/Camilla lunch

SOW: Here's the scene: It's 1981. We are in a fancy London restaurant, potentially a private room. The one thing that we know for sure is that the restaurant is called Menage a Trois, which is unbelievable to me. That sounds fake. It's too on the nose. I didn't believe it. Fact check -- it's true.

… So imagine 19-year-old Diana when Camilla, someone who has been introduced to her as a dear friend of her husband, invites her to lunch.

**

SOW: Do you remember the moment that you heard about the lunch between Camilla and Princess Diana?

ANDREW MORTON, Diana biographer: So let me set the scene. So James would be, would take all these questions from me to Kensington Palace, sit down and ask the questions. And we were talking about Diana's first impressions of life in Buckingham Palace and at Clarence house. This was the then the home of the Queen Mother. And it's where she spent the first few days after she'd agreed to marry Prince Charles. When she got into the room, there was a letter on the pillow. And the letter was from Camilla. And it, it said, you know, I know that Prince Charles is going away to Australia and New Zealand for a few weeks -- which he was -- let's meet for lunch. And I'd love to see the ring. So they meet for lunch, somewhere, I think it was in, in Knightsbridge. And Diana, she was still just a naive 20-year-old, didn't know about the relationship between Prince Charles and Camilla. But this lunch, finally the penny dropped. Camilla, was into fox hunting, she asked Diana, will you be hunting? And she said, no, I don't, I don't ride. And she later realized that, effectively, that question was Camilla just trying to find out what avenues were there so that she could continue to contact Prince Charles.

SOW: I mean, I, you’re telling the story so calmly. The version that is running in my head is just dramatic. And I, like my eyes are popping out of my head. I was like, this is such a, is such a sinister move. You know? I think that there's, it really boggles the mind that people behave this way. But people do behave this way. This is human behavior. It's just very intense.

MORTON: It's all quite calculated. I mean, when you actually stand back and look at the whole scenario, the scales began to fall from Diana's eyes. There seemed to be this huge conspiracy, first of all, to protect her from knowing anything about Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla, but also, the fact that, you know, she didn't really know Prince Charles. I mean, she was, she was besotted with him. She loved the title, she loved the idea of being married, but she didn't know the man very well. And you could argue exactly the same for Prince Charles. He didn't really know the woman very well. So there's all kinds of crossed wires that took the royal couple down this, this path.

**

SOW: And I just think of you know, I just think of her as someone who is 19 she's so young, all of this, her life is about to change. She's marrying her first boyfriend. I just like, I wonder what you think about that meeting because I, it was so shocking for me to know that it had happened.

CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, author: Yeah, I think it's because the Royals are f***ng brazen. Do you know I mean? They were just like “well, she’ll deal with it.” What are you going to say? You can’t, she's not that guy. She's not gonna fight Camilla, you know what I mean? Camilla’s not gonna fight her. It's all gonna be very shady and very underhand. God, how awful. A horrible, watery situation.

Why we love Diana but not necessarily the royal family

CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS: It's interesting, because the people that, the people that I know, and my friends, we’re aligned when it comes to the royal family. We have no interest in anyone. And we just, we just love Princess Diana, and our moms and our grandparents loved her too. And that's kind of as far as it goes for like me and the people that I know. Because The Crown, I've only watched series of Princess Diana in it. Do you know what I mean? Because I'm like, that's my, that's my girl. And I want to know what's going on. And what happened. And then after that, I was like, drawing a line. I don't need it anymore.

SOW: Right? Like she's the main character of the entire, she's the main character energy all the time.

CARTY-WILLIAMS: She was the main character of the royal family before they were even a thing. 100%.


If Diana were alive today

CARTY-WILLIAMS: I think she would be like a top philanthroper. I think she'd be putting her money and her time into good things. And I like to think that she’d be happy because I think that she’d be left alone. But then also, I don't know, because I think she would have seen what's happened with her sons. And she would have been like, oh, my God. I think that would have been really hard for her. But I do think she'd be doing good things. You know that, right? You think that as well, right?

SOW: She'd be at Barack Obama's birthday party for sure.