Princess Diana had planned to move to America with her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed before her tragic death, her former bodyguard said.
Lee Sansum was part of the security service and looked after the royal family and her sons, Princes William and Harry, during their vacation in St. Tropez in July 1997. The family stayed on businessman Mohammed Al-Fayed’s luxury yacht, the Jonikal. , and paparazzi swarmed the boat daily – desperately trying to get pictures of Diana and Dodi together.
“The press was the bane of her life everywhere, not just in St. Tropez,” Sansum writes in his book “Protecting Diana: A Bodyguard’s Story,” released Tuesday. “And she said to me, ‘There’s nothing I can do in the UK. The newspapers there are attacking me no matter what I do,’ Then she said to me, ‘I want to go to the US and live there, so that I can get away from it all, at least in America they like me and leave me alone.’”
Sansum, a former private military contractor, recalls asking Diana if her sons, William, then 15, and Harry, 12, would go with her. He writes that Diana explained that she should never take them with her and that if she were to move, “I will probably only be able to see them during their school holidays.”
But it seemed Diana had seen leaving her sons as a sacrifice that would eventually save them.
“You could tell Diana was an amazing mother, so loving and thoughtful of her two boys, but it looked like she had to leave them both in the UK to escape the press, which relentlessly pursued her every day of her life . Sansum writes. “It was also to free them from all the attention they got when she was with them.”
Finally, a few days after the holiday, Diana – angry that the press scrum was causing extra work for her security detail – suddenly announced that she was gone to tell the lurking press that she was leaving the UK for good.
“I was alarmed because if we thought the press pack outside was huge now just for her vacation, it would probably increase tenfold if she gave them a story as big as this,” the author writes. “Dads were crawling, desperate for photos of the princess about to leave everything behind to flee to America.”
According to the book, Diana did go out to talk to reporters, but in the end didn’t say anything about her plans.
Sansum wipes out critics who have labeled the king mentally unstable.
“I can tell you that I spent ten days close to her and she was one of the most balanced people I’ve ever met,” he writes. “I should know. I’m trained to see if someone is out of balance. It’s part of my job. You look for signals people give when they are under stress because it means they might be about to do something. Diana wasn’t overly angry or out of control. She was normal and very aware.”
He also dismisses reports that Dodi Al-Fayed was just a summer fling designed to make Diana’s ex-boyfriend Dr. Making Hasnat Khan jealous.
“They were very friendly and affectionate towards each other,” he writes about Di and Dodi. “The guys on the security team all thought it was game on and it was going to be a serious relationship. You wouldn’t see them kissing in public so some people misinterpreted that as if it wasn’t a romantic relationship, but her boys were often around and the paparazzi were always there too, so of course that made them more cautious and less demonstrative towards anyone. up. another.”
It was purely coincidental that Sansum was not tasked with looking after the couple as they were staying in Paris at the end of August 1997. Instead, his good friend, Trevor Rees-Jones, was given the task. Rees-Jones was seriously injured in the car accident that killed driver Henri Paul, Dodi and Diana. The car had been speeding while trying to avoid a bunch of photographers.
Diana was 36 when she died.
“Diana was one of the nicest people you could meet,” recalls Sansum. “She was sweet, really just a normal person who clearly loved her boys. The poor woman was being cheated for everything she did – even if it was very normal things, like exercising to keep fit, the press grieved her about that too. It was so unfair.”