In The Crown season six, episode three, Khalid Abdalla’s Dodi Fayed pulls out a ring to propose in a hotel room at the Ritz Paris. He never actually utters the phrase “Will you marry me?”—but Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana surmises it is coming: “I have a question I want to ask you, to which I hope you will indeed tell me yes,” Dodi asks as he gets on one knee. “No, no, no, no,” Debicki’s Diana replies. “Stop, I can’t bear it. This is madness. Please get up.”
The two then have a conversation about their future, where Diana admits she is not ready for marriage and doesn’t think Dodi is either: “I can’t make your father love you more by becoming your wife,” she says.
It’s an emotional scene, especially since the viewer knows what’s coming next: The two head out of the Ritz through the back door, where they are swarmed by paparazzi. Their driver, who is drunk, crashes their car in the tunnel under the Pont de l’Alma—killing both passengers and the driver.
While The Crown is a work of fiction, creator Peter Morgan takes his plot points from real-life events, blurring the lines between what was real and what was sensationalized in the process.
So in the case of Dodi and Diana, what actually happened?
Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana met in 1986 at a polo match in Windsor. At the time, Diana was married to Prince Charles, and their interaction was mostly just an introduction. Yet 11 years later, on July 14, the two reunited in St. Tropez on board the Jonikal, the Fayed family yacht. Diana had accepted Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed’s invitation and brought her sons, William and Harry, along. The elder Fayed had then asked his son to come down from Paris—where reportedly he was with his then fiancée Kelly Fisher.
She returned to the Jonikal the next month with just Dodi. On August 10, paparazzi photos of them kissing on board were published by the Sunday Mirror, with the headline “The Kiss: Now Dodi flies off to buy an engagement ring for Diana.” The paper reportedly paid 1 million pounds for the photos.
Engagement rumors swirled around the couple for the next (and their final) weeks. But were they true?
Dodi Fayed did buy a ring for Diana. A 2007 inquest into Diana’s death found that he purchased a ring with the inscription Dis-moi oui (French for “Tell me yes”). CCTV footage shows Dodi inside a Paris jewelry store examining several pieces, while later footage shows Claude Roulet, assistant to the president of the Ritz Paris, taking an item in a bag back to the couple’s suite. However, there was no indication at the inquest that Dodi ever gave the ring to Diana.
Yet, even if he had—was it for an engagement? “As best as I can remember, it was a kind of romantic story that Dodi asked for an engagement ring and that they had to choose together the engagement ring, which was not the truth,” Roulet said. Friends of the princess also denied the couple was engaged or thinking of marriage in the Operation Paget Report, an official investigation by the Metropolitan Police into Diana's death conducted by Commissioner Sir John Stevens. Lady Annabel Goldsmith recalled an August 29, 1997 phone call she had with the princess to investigators: “You are being sensible aren’t you? You’re not doing anything silly are you, like getting married?” She asked. Diana replied: “Not at all. I’m being spoilt and I’m having a wonderful time. Annabel, I need marriage like a rash on my face.” The Paget report also noted that Fayed gave other pieces of jewelry as gifts.
Yet Mohamed claimed that it was an engagement ring. He said that Dodi and Diana chose the ring together during a stop in Monte Carlo, then had it sized and sent to Paris. When Mohamed built a shrine for the couple at Harrods, it included the piece of jewelry.
The official conclusion of the Paget report? While they acknowledge Dodi may have intended to propose, “the evidence is that the ‘Tell me Yes’ ring was not selected as an engagement ring by the Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed together,” the Metropolitan Police found. “The weight of evidence is that the Princess of Wales was not intending to get engaged or married to Dodi Al Fayed.”
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Acclaimed crime reporter Dominick Dunne covered the inquest over Princess Diana’s death for Vanity Fair. He listened to all the testimony, including that of Mohamed Al Fayed. “The more I hear and read and think about Diana’s and Dodi’s deaths in the Pont d’Alma tunnel, in Paris, on August 31, 1997, in what is possibly the world’s most famous car crash, the more I doubt the truth of their great romance. If it was anything at all, it was a flirt, a fling,” he wrote. “The fact that she came back for a second visit so soon really shows her loneliness more than it does a passion for Dodi. Her two sons were at Balmoral, one of the Queen’s castles, with their father, Prince Charles, and their grandparents the Queen and Prince Philip, as was their August habit. Diana wasn’t being invited around to the great English estates for long weekends. She had become too famous. It was too difficult to have her stay.… The Jonikal invitations were perfect. A splendid yacht. A helicopter. A private plane. Guards to keep the paparazzi at bay,” he wrote.
“She probably knew that she was being used by a social climber for his and his son’s advancement in London society—but in high society, it was a fair deal.”
