Charlene: I Never Ran Out On Albert

Princess Charlene of Monaco has said, in an interview with the London Times, that reports of her attempting to flee the principality before her wedding were 'categorical lies'.

Earlier this year, the Times was forced to publish an apology and retracted a story they had run which repeated the claims, first made in a French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, which claimed that the distraught bride-to-be had sought refuge at the South African embassy in Paris, and that less than a week before the wedding, she was stopped from boarding a helicopter as officials coerced her to stay.

Pictures of her weeping during the marriage ceremony, and an awkward-lloking kiss, fanned the flames of the fire.

But in the interview, Charlene, a former Olympic swimmer, says: “Everything was just so overwhelming and there were all the mixed emotions because of the rumours, and obviously all this tension built up and I burst into tears [immediately after the ceremony],” she says. “And then I burst into tears some more because I was thinking, ‘Oh no, now the whole world has seen me cry’.”

On the subject of an heir, she tells the interviewer: "I’m not going to put myself under any pressure. It will happen; it will happen.”