On August 14, 1997, a woman sat before cameras in Los Angeles wearing a sapphire and diamond ring. Four days earlier, the world had seen a photograph of the man who gave her that ring kissing the Princess of Wales on the deck of a yacht in the Mediterranean. The wedding, she said, had been set for August 9. Nobody had ever told her it was off.
She said she had been left to read about it in a newspaper like everyone else. Seventeen days later, he was dead in a Paris tunnel beside the most famous woman on earth, and every word she had come to say was buried with him. The man was Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Menaem Fayed, known from birth as Dodi. He was born in Alexandria in the spring of 1955 into a marriage that barely lasted a year after his birth.
His father, Mohamed, was 26, the son of a primary school teacher, and had sold Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria before moving on to door-to-door sewing machine sales. His mother, Samira Khashoggi, was 20 and came from the center of Saudi power. Her father was personal physician to King Abdulaziz, her brother Adnan would become a famous arms dealer, and her nephew Jamal would be murdered in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul decades later. She was not decoration in that family.
She was a writer of standing across the Arab world and founded and edited a leading pan-Arab monthly magazine for women. Mohamed had been hired by her family in 1952 to help run an import business. Within two years, he had married the boss’s daughter. Within another year, there was a son, and within a year after that, the marriage was finished.
The reason given in accounts that survive was his adultery. He was expelled from the Khashoggi circle and did not go back. What he took with him was the boy. That is the founding fact of Dodi Fayed’s life.
His mother, one of the most accomplished Arab women of her generation, effectively vanished from his childhood. The boy was raised instead by a man who had just been humiliated and would spend the next four decades building a version of himself so grand that nobody could ever throw him out of anything again. Mohamed added a prefix to the family name in the early 1970s, turning Fayed into Al-Fayed, signaling a bloodline that did not exist. He would later shave four years off his age and claim a family fortune in businesses his father, the school teacher, had never possessed.
Dodi was raised inside that construction project. He was not merely a witness to it; he was one of its exhibits. There was in time a second family. Mohamed married the Finnish socialite Sami Khashoggi’s cousin, and had four more children, a legitimate English household in a way the first marriage had never been allowed to be.
Dodi was the child of the disgrace, the eldest and the heir apparent, never permitted to be securely either one. In 1968, at 13, he was sent to the most exclusive school in Switzerland, the Institut Le Rosey, known as the school of kings, and lasted about a year. The school’s director general later said the boy had not distinguished himself. The word he used was “mediocre.
” Le Rosey gave way to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where Dodi took a short course in 1974 at 18. A roommate later recalled that he “walked gracefully and converted it into an upright military posture,” a defense against a charge nobody had made. After Sandhurst came a brief attachment to the United Arab Emirates Air Force and then a post as an attaché at the UAE Embassy in London. That job was the last position Dodi Fayed ever held that his father did not create for him.
He was 19 or 20. Everything from that point onward, every company, every title, every boat, every flat, came out of Mohamed’s pocket and could go back into it. London in the mid-1970s was a good city for a young man in his situation. His father was moving through the higher reaches of it, advising the Sultan of Brunei.
The boy had a flat in Mayfair and a Rolls-Royce. He had money that arrived without being earned and stopped without warning. He wanted very badly to be liked, and he had discovered early that the fastest route to being liked was to pay. He picked up bills and arranged surprises.
A friend later said, “Dodi bought a lot more for others than himself,” and called it part of his low self-esteem. By his early 20s he was in the film business in the loosest possible sense. He liked cinema and Los Angeles. His father, watching, did what he did with everything his son showed an interest in: he bought it.
In June 1979, Mohamed founded a film company and installed Dodi as chief executive at 24, hiring somebody else to run it. The company was called Allied Stars, a subsidiary of the family’s shipping interests. The filmmaker Timothy Burrill was brought in to operate it, but every decision of consequence stayed with the father. The first credit was “Breaking Glass” in 1980.
The second credit is the one everybody knows. “Chariots of Fire” went out in 1981. Dodi’s name is on it as executive producer. The producer who actually made it was David Puttnam.
It took almost $59 million in the United States and Canada, making it at the time the highest-grossing imported film in American history. At the Academy Awards in 1982, it won four of its seven nominations, including Best Picture. Dodi was in the room. He was 26 years old.
From the stage, Puttnam thanked him with a line quoted ever since: “To Mohamed and Dodi Fayed, who came through for us and put their money where my mouth was. ”
The grammar is where the knife is. “Their money, my mouth. ” Even in the thank-you, standing in front of the whole industry on the best night of his professional life, Dodi was the checkbook and somebody else was the artist.
What the industry actually thought of him came out later on the record. Puttnam told a British newspaper in 2012 that during the making of the film, he caught Dodi supplying cocaine to the cast and crew and threw him off the production. “Dodi had other things on his mind than developing a film career for himself,” Puttnam said, “of which girls and drugs rated pretty highly, and not necessarily in that order. ” Then came the sentence that has followed the man’s reputation ever since: “He was one of the laziest human beings I have ever come across.
He had the attention span of the average flea. ”
The Fayed side rejected all of it. In a statement in November 1997, Mohamed Al-Fayed and Harrods called the reporting “particularly cruel and despicable and a tawdry exploitation of a man who was not there to defend himself” and said flatly that Dodi had never been connected to drugs. The magazine stood by every word.
More films followed, and none changed the verdict. There was “Hook” in 1991 on which his credit was executive producer and the deal-making was done by somebody else. There was “The Scarlet Letter” in 1995, a $46 million film that took $35 million and won the Golden Raspberry for worst remake. During that production, according to the same magazine reporting, Dodi tried to sell European distribution rights he had no authority to sell, and when the director confronted him, he denied it and then said the contracts had been forged.
Sixteen years in Hollywood, one Academy Award for Best Picture on the shelf, and the settled private opinion of an entire industry that the man attached to it had been a delivery mechanism for his father’s money. He was 40 years old. He had never in his life had to make a living. The allowance was $100,000 a month, and the American Express lawsuit was for $116,890.
Both of those figures belong to the same man in the same period of his life, and the space between them is where Dodi Fayed actually lived. The allowance arrived from his father with no obligation to produce anything in return. Set beside it what the court records show. American Express sued him in January 1994 for $116,890.
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 $135,575 in unpaid rent and property damage. He owed the IRS $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 five Ferraris, including a Testarossa valued at $182,000, a $90,000 Hummer, an Aston Martin, and a Honda motorcycle. 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. The mechanism by which his father kept him there survives in a single sentence. When Dodi was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles, Mohamed telephoned the management and told them he was not paying his son’s bills. A producer who spent seven years working beside him described the pattern: “Mohamed could be very strict with Dodi, and the next moment could be extremely warm and generous.
That kept Dodi off balance. ”
An unnamed producer gave the sharpest image anybody has managed: “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. ” Dodi was encouraged to fly and then not allowed to.
He telephoned home constantly, calling his father every day or every other day to report in. He was 42 years old at the end, and that had never stopped. He joined the Harrods board in 1989 and resigned after about 18 months. He sat on the board of a shirt maker and resigned after three years.
His father bought a Ferrari dealership and installed him as a director. He was never allowed to be responsible for anything, which meant he was never once required to face the consequence of a broken promise. His father absorbed them all. He had never once been made to choose.
In the summer of 1997, a situation arrived that could only be resolved by choosing, and he did what he had been trained for 42 years to do. He did neither thing and hoped both would keep. He proposed to the model Suzanne Gregard, married her on the last day of 1986, and it was finished by August. He bought tickets on Concorde and booked the seat beside her so she could not speak to anybody else on the flight.
A friend remembered her telling him that Dodi got down on the ground and kissed her feet. Her own summary of him was brief: “Dodi was a pretty impulsive person. ”
The second case is uglier because it went to court. Around 1992, he was involved with a model named Amy Diane Brown for roughly seven months.
During that time, he bought her a penthouse for $175,000 in cash and a promissory note for $30,000 more. When the relationship ended, he tried to take the property back and then sued her, alleging that she had deliberately schemed to deceive him. They settled. She handed back the deed in exchange for the furs and the cash.
Four years later she said, “It is still so terribly painful. I feel he ripped me off. ”
Set those two side by side, and a shape appears. The gesture comes first, and it is enormous.
It arrives fast before anybody has had time to ask what it means. Then the relationship proceeds on the assumption that the gesture was the promise. And then at some point his attention moves, and the woman discovers that the gesture was not a promise at all. It was a purchase, and he would quite like the goods back.
Two of those cases had produced litigation before 1997. The third one was about to. She met him in Paris in July 1996, and by her account he asked her within a year to give up the only career she had ever had. Everything in this chapter is Kelly Fisher’s account.
The man she was describing died before he could answer any of it, and the case was never tried. What is documented is the lawsuit, the ring, the press conference, and the recordings. What is claimed is everything the lawsuit was about. She was an American model, then around 30, living in Los Angeles.
She had worked through agencies in Paris and Hamburg, done covers and campaigns, and she was still working when she met him. By her account, 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. The Associated Press valued it at $233,000.
Newspapers at the time noted it resembled the sapphire engagement ring the Prince of Wales had given Diana in 1981. The wedding was set for August 9, 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. A woman in her early 30s with a working career in an industry that does not wait for anybody is asked by the man she is going to marry to stop, not to slow down, to stop. She said yes. By the early summer of 1997, Kelly Fisher had no career, a ring, a date, and a promise from a man whose entire documented history consisted of grand promises that did not survive contact with his own attention span.
Then on July 2, 1997, he bought the house. It was in Malibu at Paradise Cove, five acres on the Pacific Coast Highway, previously owned by Julie Andrews. The price was $7. 3 million, with a further $250,000 for the furnishings.
Fisher understood it to be the house they would live in after the wedding five weeks later. Hold that date, July 2, because nine days after Dodi signed for that house, the Princess of Wales landed on the French Riviera as a guest of his father. There is no evidence that he engineered that. The villa was his father’s.
The invitation was his father’s. The boat was his father’s. What Dodi did was arrive. And having arrived, he did the one thing that 42 years of being rescued had equipped him to do perfectly.
He did not end things with Fisher. He did not tell her what was happening. He did not choose. He simply let both arrangements continue running at the same time on the same coastline and trusted that whatever went wrong would be absorbed by somebody else, as it always had been.
The Princess of Wales arrived on July 11 with her two sons. Mohamed Al-Fayed had known Diana for around a decade by then. What he offered her was the one thing her own family could not easily arrange: a fortress. The villa above Saint-Tropez had a main house, a beach house, and a private jetty where a yacht could tie up without anybody on shore getting a photograph.
Diana and her sons, then 15 and 11, were reportedly put in a four-bedroom guest house. Dodi came down to join them because his father had asked him to. The boys enjoyed it. Prince Harry said years afterwards, “Everything about that trip to Saint-Tropez was heaven.
The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling. ”
On July 14, Diana got into a small motorboat in a leopard print swimsuit and drove out to the photographers moored offshore. She told them she was being abused and followed. And then she said something that has been quoted ever since: “You will have a big surprise coming soon.
The next thing I do. ” She almost certainly meant her withdrawal from public life. It has been read as prophecy ever since. Now put the other account beside it.
According to Kelly Fisher, she was also brought down to the south of France that July, not to the villa, not to the big boat. She said she was flown down and placed on the smaller Fayed vessel, an 80-foot cruiser called the Cujo. The other boat, the one the world would come to know, was the Jonikal, a 63. 8-meter superyacht built in Italy in 1990 and bought by Mohamed Al-Fayed that same year.
On Fisher’s account, the geometry of that fortnight was this: the father’s villa on the hill, the father’s new superyacht carrying the Princess of Wales and her sons, and a few hundred meters away on the father’s smaller boat, the woman his son was supposed to be marrying in three weeks, waiting. She said the days belonged to Diana 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. ”
There is no way to test that account.
The man it accuses died before he could be asked. His family denied there had ever been a formal engagement at all while not denying the relationship or the money. But the shape of it is entirely consistent with everything the previous 40 years had established. He did not resolve it.
He arranged the furniture so that neither woman had to be told anything, and then he went on being charming to both of them. The photograph was taken off Sardinia in the first week of August, and it was the most valuable photograph in the world that week. The photographer was Mario Brenna. The most careful accounts date the shot to August 4.
What is not in dispute is what he 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 around $3 million. No single number can be trusted. The range itself is the fact.
On Sunday, August 10, 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, between the 7th and the 10th of August, Diana was not on a boat at all. She was in Bosnia and Herzegovina walking minefields with two men from the landmine survivors network.
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 August 9. The photograph ran on August 10.
What passed between them in that week exists in fragments, and the fragments come from telephone calls Kelly Fisher recorded. 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.
Three words delivered down a telephone line to a woman who said she had given up her career on his instruction, who had a ring on her hand valued at more than $200,000, and who found out that it was finished the way the rest of the planet found out, on a newsstand on a Sunday. The Operation Paget police investigation made a specific observation about the Brenna picture. The sum of money it was reported to have earned focused the attention of the world’s paparazzi on the couple from that moment forward. The market had just been shown what a single frame of those two people was worth.
Kelly Fisher had four days left to decide what she was going to do about her own situation. On August 14, 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 core of it was the money: $500,000 promised in exchange for a modeling career set aside, $60,000 received, a check for $200,000 that did not clear. The lawsuit sought the shortfall, $440,000. Allred did the talking, and the language was built for the evening bulletins. “Mr.
Fayed,” she said, “needed to take responsibility for the woman that he left at the altar and treated with such total disrespect. ” She said he had led her client “emotionally all the way up to the altar and abandoned her when they were almost there. ” And then Allred said something that was not about money at all. Her client, she said, was willing to meet the Princess of Wales, anywhere in the world, to tell her what had happened.
That offer was made on August 14, 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 a denial from a family that owned Harrods carried a great deal more institutional weight than a claim from a model in California. And part of it, the larger part, 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. Seventeen days later, the choice became permanent. Everything Kelly Fisher had said on August 14 was still exactly as true or as false on September 1 as it had been a fortnight before. Not one fact about it had changed.
What had changed was that saying it out loud had become unspeakable. The second cruise began on August 21 and ended in a Paris underpass nine days later. On August 30, they flew from Sardinia to Le Bourget and came into Paris. That day exists as a timetable reconstructed from the evidence given at the inquest.
At 4:35 in the afternoon, they arrived at the Ritz by a back entrance with bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones. 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 7:00, the driver Henri Paul went off duty.
At 9:51, they came back to the Ritz through the front entrance, through the photographers, and ate until 10:01. At 10:08, Henri Paul returned to work. At 10:43, he went into the hotel bar and stayed about 25 minutes. At 11:51, a Mercedes and a Range Rover were sent out from the front of the hotel as a decoy.
At six minutes past midnight, now August 31, Diana and Dodi were waiting at the service exit on the Rue Cambon at the back of the building. Between 17 and 20 minutes past midnight, 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 23 minutes past midnight, 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 clipped a white Fiat Uno.
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, whose airbag deployed, survived with terrible injuries to his face and head. Diana was still alive. Her heart stopped at around 1:00 and was restarted. She was moved into an ambulance and reached the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital at 2:06.
She died at 4:00 in the morning. She was 36. The blood alcohol readings on Henri Paul have been reported between 1. 74 and 1.
8 grams per liter, something over three times the French legal limit, with traces of prescription medication as well. The French investigation concluded in 1999 that he had lost control at excessive speed while intoxicated and held him solely responsible. It was examined twice more in the years that followed, and no investigation ever found anything behind it, though the inquest jury would in the end lay the blame on the pursuing vehicles as well as on the car. But it was never going to be allowed to stand as the whole of the story.
A man had lost his only son by his first marriage in a car driven by an employee of his own hotel, leaving from the back door of that hotel, at the end of a summer he himself had arranged. What Mohamed Al-Fayed said instead, from the first weeks and then for the next 26 years to every investigation that would sit still long enough to hear it, was that his son had been murdered. Dodi was buried on September 1 in a quarter-acre plot in Surrey under a marble stone that carried one word: “Dodi. ” The funeral was held that day at the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park.
The grave was at Brookwood Cemetery. The headstone was five feet long and 18 inches high, and it was inscribed with the single word. 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. And then the argument began about what the summer had meant.
The Fayed position, held from the first weeks and maintained for the rest of Mohamed’s life, 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, who 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, and that the jeweler’s account of events changed in the days after the crash. Paul Burrell, who had been Diana’s butler, said he knew she would not get engaged and described the romance as having reached its peak and started down the other side.
Behind all of this ran the investigation. Operation Paget was opened in January 2004 at the request of the coroner. Its report came out on December 14, 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.
Forensic examination found no evidence that Diana had been pregnant. The inquest itself ran before Lord Justice Scott Baker from October 2007 with a jury of six women and five men and around 250 witnesses. Together, the investigation and the inquest cost more than £12. 5 million.
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 because the family could not bear the prospect of a Muslim marrying her. He said Diana had been pregnant and the couple had been engaged and were about to announce it.
Asked why he had never mentioned the engagement at the time, he said it was one hour before they were murdered. On April 7, 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 coroner had told them there was not a shred of evidence for the allegations against the Duke of Edinburgh.
The jury made no finding that Diana and Dodi had been engaged. The ring bought in Paris on the last afternoon of his life, which his father spent a quarter of a century presenting as proof of an engagement, 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.
She dropped the lawsuit on September 2, two days after he died, and said through her lawyer that she forgave him. Allred put out the statement: “She’s shocked. She has been crying. She is emotionally drained.
She has decided to forgive Dodi Fayed for the past injustices. ” And then a second sentence: “Had Mr. Fayed lived, the action would have been vigorously pursued and litigated. ”
Kelly Fisher 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. Asked to demonstrate that a dead man had once intended to marry her, she said, “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 where she works in property. 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, was when he died. ” And more simply: “You go in the course of three weeks from being engaged to then all dying. ”
Everything else went the way such things go. 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 beneath an albatross. Harrods was sold to Qatar in 2010 for £1. 5 billion. In January 2018, both memorials were taken out of the shop.
The statue was returned to the family. The space was cleared for a Harrods with no Fayeds in it at all. Mohamed Al-Fayed died on August 30, 2023, aged 94, one day short of the 26th anniversary of the crash, and was buried at Oxted beside his son. A year after his death, more than 20 women alleged in a BBC documentary that he had sexually assaulted them, and five alleged rape.
Within weeks, the number of people who had come forward ran into the hundreds. He had never been charged with anything in his lifetime. That is the man who wrote the official version of the summer of 1997. 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, because that one made his son look ordinary. 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 $100,000 a month and unpaid bills at his father’s own hotel.
He had an Oscar and no career. He bought a woman a $7 million house on July 2 and was photographed kissing somebody else five weeks later. He had never once been made to choose. On August 14, 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.