Even a quarter century after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the world refuses to let her rest in peace. While the legacy of the people’s princess continues on the large screen and the small, most famously in Netflix’s The Crown, social media has continued to run rampant with conspiracy theories that the ex-wife of Prince Charles was murdered.
In truth, the death of Princess Diana was a tragic and totally avoidable accident. That hasn’t stopped Zoomers on TikTok and Twitter from spreading the same debunked delusions promulgated decades ago by Mohamed al Fayed, the father of Diana’s last boyfriend and fellow car crash victim.
To recap that awful August night, the newly divorced Diana had been vacationing with Dodi Fayed in Paris after summering on the Fayed family yacht, the Jonikal. On the night of the crash, Diana and Dodi were leaving dinner at the Ritz, the Vendome hotel owned by Mohamed, to the Fayed flat right off the Champs-Elysees. After leaving through the back entrance of the Ritz, Diana, Dodi, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, and driver Henri Paul took off westbound along the Seine. Paul lost control of the car as they entered the tunnel under the Pont de l’Alma, ultimately crashing into a pillar at more than twice the speed limit. Paul and Fayed died on impact. Rees-Jones, the only eventual survivor of the crash, had his face so crushed that it looked nearly flat, requiring hours of reconstructive surgery. Although Diana initially looked unscathed, her heart had suffered lethal tears as the impact ripped it to the right side of her chest. Despite state-of-the-art ambulances succeeding in stabilizing her at the scene, she died a little less than two hours after the crash at the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital.
The Fayed patriarch, an Egyptian billionaire with ample media might and access, immediately alleged the crash was orchestrated. Diana, he claimed, was pregnant with his grandson, and the palace must have retaliated out of fear that the future king of England could have a Muslim half-brother.
The notion that Diana’s death was anything other than a tragic accident has been thoroughly debunked, not just by the French and British governments but also by independent investigations. Furthermore, and more importantly, the alternate explanation has already been proven: Paul was drunk as a skunk, and Trevor Rees-Jones, not beholden to the same standards as royal protection officers, had failed to ensure that the mother of the future king was wearing a seat belt in a speeding car that had taken an alternate, unvetted route.
Not only did postmortem examination prove that Diana, who had spoken of using contraceptives to her friends immediately before her death, was not pregnant, but it also showed that Paul had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit in France, with Prozac and Tiapride in his system.
Fantasists whose conspiracy theories do not hinge on Diana’s theoretical assassins using a drunk chauffeur on Fayed’s payroll point to a supposed bright flash that would have obstructed Paul’s sight as a fled paparazzi (something that Diana’s contemporaries knew that she never felt necessary in such settings). But Paul lost control of the car before the alleged flash, which the British Operation Paget concluded never actually happened.
And consider, even if someone had the motive to kill Diana, why would they bank on the inebriated head of security at the Ritz taking a last-minute route change on a suicide mission? After all, this was a woman who spent the last year of her life traveling with even less security than she did while with Fayed, traversing land mines and war zones. Why not stage an “accident” there, or better yet, blow up the Fayed yacht, the Jonikal, the same way the IRA had murdered Charles’s beloved mentor, Lord Mountbatten?
Sure, from the United Kingdom to the continent, dozens of different decisions would have resulted in Diana being alive today. Martin Bashir could have chosen not to fabricate the documents that convinced the princess that the palace was spying on her, preventing her ultimate decision to forgo royal protection. The queen could have put her foot down and forced Charles to drop Camilla and refocus on his marriage, and, of course, Charles could have decided not to force a divorce. And perhaps most crucially, Charles’s beloved mentor, Lord Mountbatten, could have decided not to doom any prospective marriage for Charles from the start by adhering to the absurd, antiquated, and patriarchal notion that Charles had to “sow his wild oats” with metaphorical whores and settle on one of the few remaining, unworldly eligible virgins on the marriage market.
It’s true that a series of terrible decisions led to Diana’s tragic death, but her ultimate end was that, a total tragedy, not an orchestration by the palace or anyone else.
