George Smith (royal Servant) - Mental Breakdown & Rape Allegation

Mental Breakdown & Rape Allegation

Critics within the Household, however, claimed that in the 1990s his work performance deteriorated dramatically. By his own admission, he began to drink heavily. In 1995, his marriage fell apart. He became clinically depressed, experiencing flashbacks to the bombing of the Sir Galahad Royal Fleet Auxiliary landing ship, on which he had served during the Falklands conflict. He subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. To recuperate, he was taken by Elizabeth Burgess, one of the Prince of Wales's secretaries, to a cottage on the Prince's Highgrove estate. While there, he alleged that he had been subject to a homosexual rape some years earlier by Michael Fawcett, a married former footman who had become one of the Prince's closest friends. Burgess, believing she had been told "in confidence", did not repeat the allegation.

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