In August 1997, the world was captivated by a single photograph. It showed Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed kissing on the deck of a yacht in the Mediterranean. The image was published on August 10th and became the most valuable photograph in the world that week, with reported earnings ranging from one million to as high as five million dollars.
Four days after that photograph was published, a woman named Kelly Fisher sat before cameras in Los Angeles wearing a sapphire and diamond ring. She claimed she was engaged to Dodi Fayed and that their wedding had been set for August 9th. She said she had to learn from a newspaper that the relationship was over. Seventeen days later, Fayed was dead in a Paris tunnel beside the Princess of Wales, and her story was largely buried with him.
Dodi Fayed was born Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em Fayed in Alexandria, Egypt, in the spring of 1955. He was called Dodi from the beginning, a diminutive that followed him into middle age. His father, Mohamed Fayed, was 26 at the time and had sold Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria before working as a 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 due to his father’s adultery. Mohamed was expelled from the Khashoggi circle, and he took the boy with him. Dodi’s mother, one of the most accomplished Arab women of her generation, effectively vanished from his childhood. He was raised by a father who would spend the next four decades building a version of himself so grand that nobody could ever dismiss him again. Mohamed added a prefix to the family name, turning Fayed into Al-Fayed, and began claiming a family fortune that did not exist.
Dodi was sent to the most exclusive schools. He lasted about a year at the Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, the school of kings, where the director general later described him as "mediocre." He took a short course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1974. A roommate from that period gave a strange character sketch, defending him against a charge nobody had made, saying he was "not fat and pampered and soft and flabby."
After Sandhurst came a brief attachment to the United Arab Emirates Air Force and a post as an attaché at the UAE Embassy in London. It was the last position Dodi ever held that his father did not create for him. Everything after that, every company, title, desk, and boat, came out of his father’s pocket.
In London in the mid-1970s, Dodi had a flat in Mayfair and a Rolls-Royce. He had money that arrived without being earned and stopped without warning. He wanted to be liked and discovered the fastest route was to pay. A friend said Dodi bought a lot more for others than himself, which was part of his low self-esteem.
In June 1979, his father founded a film company called Allied Stars and installed Dodi as chief executive at age 24. The filmmaker Timothy Burrill was brought in to actually run it. The company’s second credit was *Chariots of Fire*, released 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, the film won four Oscars, including Best Picture. Dodi was in the room. From the stage, Puttnam thanked him, saying, "To 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 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. He called Dodi "one of the laziest human beings I have ever come across" with "the attention span of the average flea." The Fayed side rejected all of it, saying Dodi had never been connected to drugs.
By his early 40s, Dodi had an Academy Award on the shelf and the settled private opinion of an entire industry that he was a delivery mechanism for his father’s money. His allowance was $100,000 a month. Court records show he was sued by American Express in January 1994 for $116,890. In one stretch of three months, he spent $12,835 on furs, $10,684 at Armani, and $14,869 on jewelry. He owed the IRS $93,053 in back taxes and ran up a bill of $15,000 at the Ritz in Paris, a hotel his father owned.
The mechanism by which his father kept him in place 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 worked with him described the pattern: "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 proposed to model Suzanne Gregard and married her on the last day of 1986. 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. 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, alleging she had deliberately schemed to deceive him.
Kelly Fisher met Dodi in Paris in July 1996. By her account, he asked her within a year to give up the only career she had ever had. She was an American model, then around 30, living in Los Angeles. 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 $233,000. The wedding was set for August 9th, 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 and that a further check for $200,000 bounced. On July 2nd, 1997, he bought a house in Malibu at Paradise Cove for $7.3 million. Fisher understood it to be the house they would live in after the wedding.
Nine days after Dodi 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 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 simply let both arrangements continue running at the same time on the same coastline.
According to 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 other boat, the *Jonikal*, carried the Princess of Wales and her sons. Fisher said the days belonged to Diana and the nights came back to her. She later said on a telephone recording, "You even flew me down to St. Tropez to sit on a boat while you seduced Diana all day."
The photograph of the kiss was taken off Sardinia in the first week of August. In exactly those days, Diana 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. In Los Angeles, a woman who said she should have been married the day before was looking at the front pages.
On the 14th of August, Kelly Fisher 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, seeking the shortfall of $440,000. Allred said 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 August 14th, 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. 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.
The second cruise began on August 21st and ended in a Paris underpass nine days later. On August 30th, they flew from Sardinia to Le Bourget and came into Paris. That evening, they visited the Villa Windsor, the house the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had lived in during their exile. At 3:35 in the afternoon, they arrived at the Ritz by a back entrance. At 5:42, Dodi walked to the jewelers on the Rue de la Paix and came back with a brochure.
At 12:06 past midnight, now the 31st of August, 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. 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.
Mohamed Al-Fayed said from the first weeks that his son had been murdered. He alleged that the British Foreign Intelligence Service had conspired against him and 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 she had been pregnant and that the couple had been engaged.
The inquest ran before Lord Justice Scott Baker from October 2007 with a jury of six women and five men and around 250 witnesses. In February 2008, Mohamed Al-Fayed gave evidence. On April 7th, 2008, the jury returned its verdict. Nine of the 11 agreed on 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.
Kelly Fisher dropped her lawsuit on September 2nd, 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." Allred added, "Had Mr. Fayed lived, the action would have been vigorously pursued and litigated."
Fisher kept the ring. 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 since. 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 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, was when he died."
Mohamed Al-Fayed unveiled a shrine inside Harrods in April 1998. In September 2005 came a bronze statue of the couple dancing barefoot in the waves. In January 2018, both memorials were taken out of the shop. Mohamed Al-Fayed died on August 30th, 2023, aged 94, one day short of the 26th anniversary of the crash, and was buried 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. 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.
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 bought a woman a $7 million house on July 2nd and was photographed kissing somebody else five weeks later. 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.