Royals

Charles Spencer Confirms His Relationship With His Podcast Cohost Cat Jarman

The news comes amid his divorce from his third wife, Karen Spencer.
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A few months after announcing his divorce, Princess Diana’s younger brother Charles Spencer has confirmed that he is in a relationship with Cat Jarman, the cohost of his history podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives. In an appearance on Good Morning Britain to promote The Rabbit Hole Book: 99 Adventures Into the History of Stuff, the book Spencer and Jarman cowrote with their fellow host Richard Coles, Spencer said that Jarman is his “partner” and explained the story of how they met and began working on a podcast together.

“I met her because we both had the same publisher,” he said. “Secondly—I know this sounds rather bizarre, but she came to dig up a Roman villa on some land I’ve got. Richard, Cat and I would end up together and Richard had been recently bereaved so was semi-living with me and the three of us would just talk and talk and talk. Cat said, ‘Let’s do a podcast.’”

In June, Spencer announced that he and his third wife Karen Spencer were divorcing following 13 years of marriage, and the Mail on Sunday reported that their relationship had deteriorated while he was revisiting details of his childhood abuse in the process of writing his recent memoir, A Very Private School. Charles Spencer has tapped Fiona Shackleton, the lawyer King Charles retained for his divorce from Princess Diana in the 1990s, for the proceedings, according to the Evening Standard.

In a follow-up post in August, Karen shared that she was still living on the Althorp House grounds but no longer has access to the newsletter list she previously used to disseminate updates about her work researching and renovating the estate, which has been in the Spencer family since the 16th century. (Karen Spencer declined to comment when reached by Vanity Fair.)

The legal backdrop of the divorce is already getting more complicated. According to The Telegraph, Jarman filed a lawsuit against Karen Spencer last week, alleging “misuse of private information.” Requests for comment to Jarman and Charles Spencer were not immediately returned.