More than 30 years after Princess Diana's death, the world is still trying to get a full picture of the person she was. According to an excerpt from Princess Diana's biographer Tina Brown's latest book, "The Palace Papers," published in Vanity Fair magazine, her son Prince William, then a teenager, was the person who knew her best. As adults, both Prince William and Prince Harry are known for not being particularly forthcoming with the media about their mother (for obvious reasons), but according to Brown's excerpt, the intimacy between Diana, William, and the press was out of the ordinary for a mother and son.

Brown writes that by the time William was a young teenager, he knew all the good, the bad, and the ugly about his mother's relationships with men and with the tabloids. For example, he writes that 13-year-old William was invited to a meeting with Piers Morgan, of all people, where Morgan insisted that William have a glass of wine and seemed to know all about his mother's affairs. William told Morgan that he had a picture of Julia Carling (wife of the man Princess Diana was dating) on the dartboard at Eton.

Tina Brown notes that being told all of his mother's secrets, and seeing those secrets leaked to the public and ultimately her death at age 36, led to Prince William's "obsession with being tough, firm, and controlling" in regard to the press He noted that this was the cause.

In 2021, Prince William issued a statement accusing the BBC's Martin Bashir of using deceptive and manipulative methods to contact Princess Diana for the infamous 1995 interview. He said via NPR, "You have effectively established a false narrative that has been commercialized by the BBC and others for over a quarter of a century." Two years earlier, when rumors circulated that William himself was having an affair, the prince swooped in to contain them by taking immediate legal action.