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Will we ever know what really happened?
At the time of her death, Princess Diana was—as her brother Charles Spencer said in his searing eulogy—”the most hunted person of the modern age.” Everything the princess said and did—from the time she became engaged to Prince Charles in 1981 right up until the last moments of her life on August 31, 1997—was exhaustively covered by journalists and photographers around the world.
In the two decades since her death, there have been all kinds of investigations attempting to answer the lingering suspicions and “what ifs” surrounding the circumstances of the car crash that killed Diana, her then-boyfriend Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul. Sadly, there are details surrounding that fateful night in Paris that still raise more questions than they do answers. Here are the biggest questions that remain unanswered about the night the People’s Princess died.
1 What was Diana doing in Paris?
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Earlier this year, a royal insider told me Diana never intended to go to Paris—or to be with Dodi at all. “She was not supposed to spend her summer with the Fayeds,” said the source at the time. “And she most certainly had not planned on being in Paris with Dodi at the end of August. In fact, she was tiring of the whole episode and was eager to see [Prince] William and [Prince] Harry before they went off to school. It was Dodi who insisted they stop off in Paris for the night before heading back to London. She wanted to get home.”
Diana had several offers to stay with friends that summer. In 2017, handbag designer Lana Marks told The Sun that Diana was supposed to go on holiday with her to Italy during the time the princess wound up in Paris, but Marks backed out of the trip at the last minute when her father died suddenly. When Marks canceled, the princess decided to stay with Dodi. “I constantly think, ‘What if she’d been with me?’ All that might not have happened,” Marks told The Sun.
Another friend of the princess’ told me, “The day before [Diana] died, she told me she didn’t want to spend the night in Paris, but she somehow relented. I will never stop asking myself what made her do that.”
