In August 1997, the world was watching one of the most photographed romances in history unfold on a yacht in the Mediterranean. But on the 14th of that month, a woman in Los Angeles sat before the cameras wearing a sapphire and diamond ring, claiming she was the one Dodi Fayed was supposed to marry. She said the wedding had been set for the 9th of August, and that nobody had ever told her it was off.
Seventeen days later, Dodi Fayed was dead in a Paris tunnel beside Diana, Princess of Wales. The story she came to tell was buried with him.
Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em Fayed was born in Alexandria in the spring of 1955. He was called Dodi from the beginning, a diminutive that followed him into middle age. His father, Mohamed, was 26, a former Coca-Cola seller and door-to-door sewing machine salesman. His mother, Samira Khashoggi, came from the center of Saudi power. Her brother Adnan would become the most famous arms dealer of the 20th century.
The marriage ended within a year, reportedly over Mohamed’s adultery. He was expelled from the Khashoggi circle, and he took the boy with him. Samira effectively vanished from her son’s childhood. She died in 1986 at 51, by which time her former husband owned Harrods.
Mohamed spent the next four decades building a version of himself so grand that nobody could ever throw him out again. He added the prefix “Al” to the family name, signaling a bloodline that did not exist. Dodi was raised inside that construction project, as an exhibit. He had access to absolutely everything, but owned absolutely nothing.
At 13, he was sent to the most exclusive school in Switzerland, Le Rosey, known as the school of kings. He lasted about a year. The school’s director general later said the boy had not distinguished himself. The word he used was mediocre.
He then took a short course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1974. A roommate later gave a strange character sketch, defending him against a charge nobody had made: that he was not fat, pampered, soft, or flabby. Even the warm memories of Dodi Fayed arrived braced against the accusation of softness.
After Sandhurst came a brief attachment to the UAE Air Force and a post as an attaché at the UAE Embassy in London. It was the last position he ever held that his father did not create for him.
By his early 20s, he was in the film business. In June 1979, his father founded a film company, Allied Stars, and installed him as chief executive at 24. The first credit was Breaking Glass in 1980. The second was Chariots of Fire in 1981.
Dodi’s name was on it as executive producer, but the producer who actually made it was David Puttnam. At the Academy Awards in 1982, it won Best Picture. From the stage, Puttnam thanked “Mohamed and Dodi Fayed, who came through for us and put their money where my mouth was.” Even in the thank you, Dodi was the checkbook and somebody else was the artist.
Puttnam later told a British newspaper that during the making of the film, he caught Dodi supplying cocaine to the cast and crew and threw him off the production. He called him one of the laziest human beings he had ever come across. The Fayed side rejected all of it.
The films kept coming, and none of them changed the verdict. There was Hook in 1991 and The Scarlet Letter in 1995, a $46 million film that was savaged by critics and won the Golden Raspberry for worst remake. Sixteen years in Hollywood, one Academy Award on the shelf, and the settled private opinion of an entire industry was that the man attached to it had been a delivery mechanism for his father’s money.
The allowance was $100,000 a month. The American Express lawsuit was for $116,890. Both figures belong to the same man in the same period of his life.
In one stretch of three months, he spent $12,835 on furs, $10,684 at Armani, $14,869 on jewelry, and $9,385 at Harrods, his father’s own shop. He wrote bad checks totaling $31,815. He owed the Internal Revenue Service $93,053 in back taxes. He ran up a bill of $15,000 at the Ritz in Paris, a hotel his father had owned since 1979.
He rented rather than owned almost everywhere. He had a flat in London that his father had given him as a boy and would keep after his death exactly as it was. None of this is the portrait of a rich man. It is the portrait of a man standing next to a great deal of money.
When Dodi was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles, his father telephoned the management and told them he was not paying his son’s bills. A producer who worked with him gave the sharpest image: “It is like when you are training a dog and you use a choke chain. You give a little freedom then you need to give a pull.”
He was 42 years old at the end, and he still telephoned his father constantly to report in.
He proposed to the model Suzanne Gregard, married her on the last day of 1986, and it was finished by August. Around 1992, he was involved with a model named Amy Diane Brown for roughly seven months. He bought her a penthouse for $175,000 in cash. When the relationship ended, he tried to take the property back and sued her. They settled.
The gesture came first, and it was enormous. Then the relationship proceeded on the assumption that the gesture was the promise. Then his attention moved, and the woman discovered that the gesture was not a promise at all. It was a purchase, and he would quite like the goods back.
She met him in Paris in July 1996. By her account, he asked her within a year to give up the only career she had ever had. Her name was Kelly Fisher, and she was an American model.
They were together for roughly eight months before he proposed, which places the proposal in February 1997. He gave her a sapphire and diamond ring, valued at the time at $233,000. The wedding was set for the 9th of August 1997.
She said he asked her to stop modeling and promised her $500,000 to compensate her for the career she was setting aside. She said she received $60,000 of it in cash. She said a further check for $200,000 bounced.
On the 2nd of July 1997, he bought a house in Malibu for $7.3 million. Fisher understood it to be the house they would live in after the wedding five weeks later.
Nine days after he signed for that house, the Princess of Wales landed on the French Riviera as a guest of his father. The villa was his father’s. The invitation was his father’s. The boat was his father’s. The summons that brought Dodi down to the south of France came down a telephone line from the man who paid for everything.
Dodi did not end things with Fisher. He did not tell her what was happening. He simply let both arrangements continue running at the same time on the same coastline.
The Princess of Wales arrived on the 11th of July with her sons, then 15 and 11. They were put in a guest house on the grounds of the villa above Saint-Tropez. The boys enjoyed it. “Everything about that trip to Saint-Tropez was heaven,” Harry said years afterwards.
According to Kelly Fisher, she was also brought down to the south of France that July. She said she was flown down and placed on the smaller Fayed vessel, an 80-foot cruiser called the Cujo. The days belonged to Diana, she said, and the nights came back to her.
On a telephone recording played in a London courtroom a decade later, she put it plainly: “You even flew me down to Saint-Tropez to sit on a boat while you seduced Diana all day.”
The holiday broke up around the 20th of July. In the first week of August, Diana went back to the Mediterranean and back to the Jonikal. A photographer in a boat off Sardinia raised a long lens.
The photograph was taken off Sardinia in the first week of August. It caught Diana and Dodi in an embrace on the deck of a yacht, unmistakably and unambiguously together. The figures reported for what that single image earned range from over a million to as high as $5 million.
On Sunday the 10th of August, the Sunday Mirror put it on the front page under two words: “The Kiss.” Within 48 hours, it was on newsstands on every continent.
In exactly those days, Diana was not on a boat at all. She was in Bosnia walking minefields. The photograph of the kiss and the photographs of the minefields ran in the same news cycle, and only one of them is remembered.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a woman who said she should have been married the day before was looking at the front pages. On her account, the wedding had been set for the 9th of August. The photograph ran on the 10th.
On the recordings she made of telephone calls with Dodi, she put it to him that he had flown her to Saint-Tropez to sit on a boat while he spent his days with Diana. His answer on the recording was three words: “We broke up, Kelly.”
That is the whole of his defense, so far as anything he said on the subject has ever been preserved. He did not tell her. He simply stopped and let the news do the work.
On the 14th of August, she walked into a room full of cameras in Los Angeles wearing the ring. Beside her sat the attorney Gloria Allred. The claim they filed was breach of contract. The lawsuit sought the shortfall of $440,000.
Allred did the talking. “Mr. Fayed needed to take responsibility for the woman that he left at the altar and treated with such total disrespect,” she said. Then she said something that was not about money at all: her client was willing to meet the Princess of Wales, anywhere in the world, to tell her what had happened.
That offer was made on the 14th of August, 1997. No reply ever came. Diana had 18 days to live.
The press conference should have been enormous. It was not. Part of that was that the Fayed side denied any formal engagement had existed. And part of it was that the alternative story was simply better. A princess who had been unhappy for years had found somebody. Nobody wanted the version with a lawsuit in it.
The second cruise began on the 21st of August. On the 30th of August, they flew from Sardinia to Paris. Earlier that day, they visited the Villa Windsor.
At 3:35 in the afternoon, they arrived at the Ritz by a back entrance. At 5:42, Dodi walked to the jeweler’s on the Rue de la Paix and came back with a brochure. At 6:53 they left the hotel for his Paris flat. At 9:51 they came back to the Ritz through the front entrance, through the photographers, and they ate until 10:10.
At 11:51, a Mercedes and a Range Rover were sent out from the front of the hotel as a decoy. At 12:06, now the 31st of August, Diana and Dodi were waiting at the service exit on the Rue Cambon at the back of the building.
Between 12:17 and 12:20, a black Mercedes S280 pulled away from the rear of the Ritz. Henri Paul was driving. Trevor Rees-Jones was in the front passenger seat. Diana and Dodi were behind them. None of the four was wearing a seat belt.
At around 12:23, pursued by photographers on motorcycles, the car went into the underpass at the Pont de l’Alma at an estimated 105 km/h in a limit of 50. It struck the 13th pillar head-on.
Henri Paul was pronounced dead at the scene. Dodi Fayed was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 42 years old. Trevor Rees-Jones survived with terrible injuries. Diana was still alive. She died at 4:00 in the morning. She was 36.
The blood alcohol readings on Henri Paul were over three times the French legal limit. The French investigation concluded in 1999 that he had lost control at excessive speed while intoxicated and held him solely responsible.
It was never going to be allowed to stand as the whole of the story. What Mohamed Al Fayed said instead, from the first weeks and then for the next 26 years, was that his son had been murdered.
Dodi was buried on the 1st of September in a quarter-acre plot in Surrey under a marble stone that carried one word: Dodi. In the middle of October, the body, the headstone, and the marble were all lifted and moved again to a private plot on the family estate at Oxted.
Then the argument began about what the summer had meant. The Fayed position was that his son and the Princess of Wales had been engaged, that a ring had been bought in Paris on the last afternoon for exactly that purpose, and that an announcement had been days away.
Against that stands the sworn evidence of Claude Roulet, an assistant to the president of the Ritz. Roulet told the inquest that the engagement ring story was constructed after the fact by the jeweler. He testified that the ring selected was the cheapest option that had been presented, chosen by Dodi alone in a last-minute decision rather than jointly with Diana.
Operation Paget was opened in January 2004. Its report came out in December 2006, 832 pages long, having examined 175 separate conspiracy allegations. Its conclusion was that there had been no conspiracy to murder anybody in that car.
The inquest itself ran from October 2007 with a jury of six women and five men and around 250 witnesses. In February 2008, Mohamed Al Fayed gave evidence. He alleged that the British Foreign Intelligence Service had conspired against him. He alleged that the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales had wanted to be rid of Diana.
On the 7th of April 2008, the jury returned its verdict. Nine of the 11 agreed: unlawful killing by the grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes, with the impairment of the driver’s judgment through alcohol and the absence of seat belts as contributing factors.
The jury made no finding that Diana and Dodi had been engaged. The ring bought in Paris on the last afternoon of his life was found by the only court that ever examined it to prove nothing at all.
There was, however, another ring. That one had been photographed on a woman’s hand in a room full of cameras in Los Angeles 17 days before he died, and nobody had ever disputed that he gave it to her.
Kelly Fisher dropped the lawsuit on the 2nd of September, two days after he died, and said through her lawyer that she forgave him. She kept the ring.
She said very little for a decade. Then in December 2007, she was called to give evidence at the inquest in London, and the recorded telephone calls were played in open court.
Her answer to that is the line this whole story comes down to: “It is just quite humiliating to sit here and try to prove to people that someone wanted to marry you.”
She has given almost no interviews. She married a Russian pilot in 2007, had a daughter in 2011, and settled in South Carolina. She is the only principal in this story still alive to be asked about that summer.
The little she has said outside the witness box has been about grief rather than money. “I was heartbroken to see the pictures of Diana and Dodi together,” she said. “But the most heartbroken I ever was, ever, was when he died.”
Mohamed Al Fayed unveiled a shrine inside Harrods in April 1998. In September 2005 came a bronze statue of the two of them dancing barefoot in the waves. Harrods was sold to Qatar in 2010. In January 2018, both memorials were taken out of the shop.
Mohamed Al Fayed died on the 30th of August 2023, aged 94, one day short of the 26th anniversary of the crash, and was buried at Oxted beside his son.
He spent 26 years insisting that his son had been about to marry the Princess of Wales on the strength of a ring that the Ritz’s own executive testified had been a story invented after the crash. In the same 26 years, he never once conceded the engagement that had a date, a house, a part-paid promise, a bounced check, and a court filing.
The truth underneath both versions is smaller and sadder than either. Dodi Fayed had been given everything and permitted to be responsible for nothing. He had never once been made to choose.
In the last summer of his life, his father placed both women on the same stretch of French coast, and he moved between them because moving between things without choosing was the only method he had ever been taught.
On the 14th of August 1997, a woman sat down before the cameras in Los Angeles wearing the ring and told the truth as she understood it to a room that had already decided it preferred the other story. Seventeen days later, the other story became sacred, and hers became something nobody was willing to hear.
She has been carrying it quietly ever since.