Did Dodi Al Fayed Really Propose to Princess Diana?

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The first part of the final season of The Crown is here, and it focuses mainly on Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed's relationship before their tragic deaths in a car crash in the early hours of August 31, 1997.

Yet, before this fateful crash, the third episode The Crown season six imagines Dodi proposing to Diana, with a ring he purchased earlier that day. The Crown often draws from real life events, but it's not a documentary, nor does it purport to be. "There are two sorts of truth. There's historical truth and then there's the larger truth about the past," Robert Lacey, the show's historical consultant, told Town & Country.

So: Did Dodi really propose to Diana? Did she really reject him? Not to our knowledge. By all accounts—except that of Mohamed Al Fayed (we'll get to that)—the two were not engaged at the time of their deaths.

Their relationship began earlier that summer, when Mohamed invited Diana and her sons to vacation with his family in Saint Tropez. Diana had been dating surgeon Hasnat Khan for two years, and reportedly called him the love of her life, whereas Dodi was linked to (and possibly engaged to) American model Kelly Fisher.

"When Diana went to St. Tropez with Mr. Al Fayed, everything was fine between us," Hasnat would later tell police investigating Diana's death. "After a few days, I felt something was wrong. Her mobile kept going on to answerphone." And so Diana and Dodi's relationship began. During the inquest into her death years later, her friends Annabel Goldsmith and Rosa Monckton spoke about her relationship with Hasnat, and how they viewed Dodi as a rebound.

During the inquest, too, her sister Sarah McCorquodale testified she spoke to Diana on August 29, and "her impression was that the relationship had not much longer to run."

Flash forward to August 30, 1997, Diana and Dodi had flown from Sardinia to Paris, and were planning to fly back to London the following day. He did purchase the "Dis-Moi Out" ("Tell Me Yes") ring, but it's unclear if it was an engagement ring. In the years following their deaths, Mohamed Al Fayed would claim that Diana was pregnant (she wasn't, according to medical and forensic efforts), that the two were going to be engaged, and that they were murdered by the British royal family.

Her former butler, Paul Burrell, said Diana did not want to be married again. "Her precise words to me were: 'I want another marriage like I want a bad rash,'" Burrell wrote in his memoir, The Way We Were: Remembering Diana. "[Mohamed Al Fayed] must accept the Princess and Dodi had no more than a summer fling. The world must stop believing Diana and Dodi were due to get married, because that simply isn't true."

We may never know what happened between Dodi and Diana on August 30; The Crown just imagines one possibility.

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