My good friend Gerald Posner, an American investigative journalist and author of thirteen award winning books, reminds us of the conspiracy theories that swirled around Diana’s death. He talks about it in his popular Substack column, “Just the Facts,”that is gaining more and more eyeballs every day. Gerald gave me permission to reprint it in my blog. Substack is a desktop and app platform designed for creators to produce and distribute newsletters, podcasts, and other forms of content directly to their audience. Check it out. Gerald just announced good news regarding his Substack newsletter. Congratulations Gerald!

Today marks 29 years since Princess Diana died at the age of 36 in Paris, when the car she was in crashed while being chased at high speed by paparazzi.

Two years later, the magazine editor Tina Brown asked me to investigate the persistent conspiracy theories swirling around Diana’s death. The story was for the premier issue of her new magazine, TALK.

Over a couple of months, including reporting from Paris, Washington, and London, I interviewed dozens of people, some for the first time, including the paparazzi who chased the car that night, French police, the pathology team that treated Diana at the hospital, and sources ranging from the U.S. National Security Agency to the British Home Office.

I spent hours with Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi was also killed in the crash and who was spending a fortune trying to prove it was murder. 

At one point I was shown unpublished photos of Diana in the wrecked car, before emergency crews arrived — photos someone was trying to sell for $2 million.

The TALK article, “Al-Fayed’s Rage,” broke several things:

 • Diana might have survived the crash if not for mistakes by the arriving medics and ambulance crew.

 • First accounts from witnesses who slipped away from the scene because police failed to secure the perimeter.

 • Hospital lab work so shoddy that the driver’s blood sample may have been contaminated.

 • Evidence that French intelligence agents met with the driver just three hours before the fatal crash.

 • Classified French police files shedding light on the mysterious Fiat Uno many believed was involved.

 • The first report that someone from the UK Home Secretary’s office interrupted the autopsy to order any reference to a possible pregnancy struck from the record.

 • The first disclosure that NSA surveillance of the Brazilian embassy in Washington had accidentally picked up conversations between Princess Diana and the wife of the Brazilian ambassador.

Was it murder? No. But the errors and cover-ups I uncovered by French and British authorities are exactly what fed the “who killed Di?” theories that persist to this day.

My full 1999 article for anyone who wants the whole story: https://www.justthefacts.media/p/was-princess-di-murdered-full-copy-13-08-18