British aristocrat with ties to Churchill faces choking charge

British police say the Duke of Marlborough has been charged with choking someone

LONDON -- The Duke of Marlborough, a British aristocrat with a troubled past, has been charged with choking someone, police said Wednesday.

Charles James Spencer-Churchill, 70, was ordered to appear Thursday in Oxford Magistrates’ Court on three counts of nonfatal intentional strangulation between November 2022 and May 2024, Thames Valley Police said.

The duke, who is a distant relative of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, has battled drug addiction in the past and was disinherited by his father.

Before his father passed away in 2014, he was the Marquess of Blandford and also known as Jamie Blandford.

His father, the 11th Duke of Marlborough, went to court in 1994 to prevent his son from getting the massive 300-year-old Blenheim Palace estate, birthplace of Churchill and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site popular with tourists.

″I think there have been black sheep in every family and there’s nothing new about that," his father said outside of court at the time. “We have had some good ’uns and some bad ’uns.”

The family's motto is “faithful though unfortunate” and the duke has blamed his privilege for his problems.

He is a first cousin three times removed from Churchill and distantly related to the late Diana through the Spencer line.

Blenheim Palace, which is owned and managed by the Blenheim Palace Heritage Foundation, was the site of a high-profile heist of a golden toilet, a satirical artwork, valued at 4.7 million pounds ($6.2 million) in 2019.

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