Royal Insiders Are Upset About Netflix's Latest Princess Diana Tweet

• In the fourth season of Netflix's hit drama The Crown, viewers get a glimpse at the beginnings of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's relationship (opens in new tab)—albeit one that many royal experts and insiders say is inaccurate. 
• While the show makes it seem as though Charles' affair with Camilla Parker Bowles was going on at the very beginning of his relationship with Diana, it actually began later.
• Netflix responded to royal fans' questions about the depiction by tweeting a clip from the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words (opens in new tab), which also seems to suggest that Charles and Camilla were romantically during her engagement to Charles. Royal insiders take issue with the tweet, calling it "sinister." 

Netflix's hit drama The Crown (opens in new tab) has a lot of fans, but the members of the royal family (opens in new tab) are reportedly not among them—especially since the premiere of the show's controversial fourth season (opens in new tab).

In Season 4, The Crown (opens in new tab) took on more modern royal moments—like the early days of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's relationship (opens in new tab), for example. That's the thing that many royal experts and insiders take the biggest issue with, since the show presents a sometimes misleading (opens in new tab) (or outright inaccurate) picture of the fraught romance. Specifically, the show implies that Charles was cheating on Diana (opens in new tab) with his now-wife, Camilla Parker Bowles (opens in new tab), from the very beginning of their marriage, which was not the case in real life.

As a result of this liberal take on history, many royal fans and viewers of The Crown (opens in new tab) were left with lots of questions after watching the fourth season. Netflix recently responded to fans' questions on Twitter by sharing a clip from the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words (opens in new tab), along with the message, "The documentary DIANA: IN HER OWN WORDS answers much of what you’re asking."

In the clip shared in the Netflix tweet, Diana discusses her famously tearful goodbye with Charles at the airport in 1981, when they were just engaged. In the audio clip, Diana reveals the real reason she was crying that day—which had to do with Charles' relationship with Camilla (opens in new tab).

"You may recall seeing a picture of me sobbing in a red coat when [Prince Charles] went off on his aeroplane," Diana says in the clip. "That was nothing to do with him going. The most awful thing had happened before he went....I was in his study talking to him about his trip. The telephone rang; it was Camilla, and just before he was going for five weeks. So I thought, 'Shall I be nice, or shall I just sit here?' So I thought I'd be nice, so I left them to it. And it just broke my heart, that."

Those close to the royal family were upset with Netflix's decision to tweet the clip, which they see as doubling down on the narrative about Charles and Diana's relationship (opens in new tab) presented in The Crown.

"It's one thing to make a drama that not even the writer claims is entirely factual, but for Netflix to use its corporate social channels to create and post material that is one-sided at best feels like corporate trolling—it's pretty sinister," one royal insider said, according to the Daily Mail (opens in new tab). 

FWIW, royal correspondent Omid Scobie has said that Netflix asked the royal family to participate in fact-checking The Crown (opens in new tab), but that the royals declined.