‘I felt I was a lamb to slaughter’
The late princess, speaking when her marriage was in crisis, said Charles made her "feel so inadequate in every possible way" and described how bulimia and depression blighted her life.
She detailed apparent attempts at suicide by hurling herself down a flight of stairs, slashing her chest and thighs with a penknife, cutting her wrists and throwing herself into a glass cabinet at Kensington Palace.
According to the princess, Charles had been disappointed their second child, Harry, was a boy and that he hated his red hair.
She also claimed she had wanted Prince William's birth to be induced but had to schedule the procedure around her husband's participation in polo games.
The audio tapes, aired on the US network NBC, were used as the basis for Andrew Morton's best-seller Diana: Her True Story.
Diana recorded six audio tapes, as well as video tapes, in secret sessions at Kensington Palace.
"My husband made me feel so inadequate in every possible way that each time I came up for air he pushed me down again," she said.
"I hated myself so much. I didn't think I was good enough. The public side they wanted a fairy princess, someone who touched them and everything would turn to gold.
"Little did they realise that the individual was crucifying herself inside because she didn't think she was good enough."
Diana recounted her life story on the tapes, describing the first time she went to stay at Balmoral, when she was dating Charles.
"I was s****ng bricks. I was terrified", she said about the prospect of meeting the queen.
Describing the moment Charles proposed, she said: "I remember thinking, 'this is a joke'. So I said: 'Okay', and laughed.
"A voice inside me said, 'You won't be queen but you will have a tough role', so I said yes."
Days after accepting his proposal she began to develop bulimia.
"Bulimia started the week after we were engaged," she said. "My husband had his hand on my waist and said, 'Ooh, a bit chubby aren't we?'. I ate everything I could possibly find and I was sick as a parrot."
She recalled getting cold feet on the royal wedding day: "I said, 'I cannot marry him. I cannot do this'." But she was eventually talked around by her family.
She recounted her wedding day: "I was very deathly calm, deathly, deathly calm. I felt as though I was a lamb to the slaughter.
"I thought the whole thing was hysterical in the sense it was so grown up and here was Diana, a kindergarten teacher. It was ridiculous." But she said she loved Charles.
"I couldn't take my eyes off him and I absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world and that he was going to look after me. Well I was wrong."
She her hopes for a happy marriage were "slashed" by day two of the honeymoon, after her new husband spent most of the time reading.
Charles also carried two photos of Camilla Parker Bowles in his diary during the honeymoon, she said.
Diana told of the famous incident during a trip to Canada in 1986 when she fainted, ill from bulimia.
"I put my arm on my husband's shoulder and said: 'Oh golly, I think I'm going to disappear', and slid down the side of him. My husband told me off. He said I could have passed out somewhere else. It was all very embarrassing."
Just five months into the wedding she told Charles she felt "desperate" about their relationship.
"Charles said I was 'crying wolf' and I said I just felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out.
"And he said, 'I'm not going to listen, you're always doing this to me, I'm going riding. So I threw myself down the stairs bearing in mind I was carrying a child.
"The queen comes out, absolutely horrified. Shaking, she was so frightened.
She also told how she tried to cut her wrists and threw herself into a glass cabinet at Kensington Palace. In the mid 1980s she came home early from the annual royal stay in Scotland.
"I had to come down for treatment because I was so depressed. I was trying to cut my wrists with razor blades."
Describing another incident of self harm, she said: "I picked up his penknife off his dressing table and scratched myself down my chest and both thighs. There was a lot of blood." She said Charles had "no reaction whatsoever".
"Nobody else around me understood me," she said.
She also said she once heard Charles, in the bath, talking to Mrs Parker Bowles by telephone.
"Charles said: 'whatever happens I will always love you'," she claimed. When pregnant with William,
Diana wanted to be induced but said it was difficult to schedule a birth date around Charles's polo matches.
"We found a day that Charles could get off his polo pony for me to give birth. That was very nice," she said sarcastically.
On February 14, 1984, it was announced she was pregnant with Harry. The six-week period before Harry was born was when they were closest, she said.
But then: "Harry was born it just was bang. Our marriage was down the drain. And Charles, all he wanted was a girl.
"First comment was: 'Oh god it's a boy'. Second comment: 'Oh no, he's even got red hair'," she claimed.
NBC said the footage was taken between September 1992 and December 1993, at a time when Diana's marriage to Charles was in turmoil. The marriage ended in July, 1996.
The princess denied talking to Morton when he was working on the book. But after her death in a Paris car crash in 1997 he said she had collaborated with him.
NBC did not disclose how it acquired rights to the tapes. A second part of the two-part, two-hour documentary is being aired in the US next Thursday.
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