“The Crown” Fact vs. Fiction: Did Dodi Fayed Propose to Princess Diana Hours Before They Died?

The question of whether Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were engaged was investigated 10 years later during a formal inquest into their deaths

Warning: This post contains spoilers from season 6 of The Crown.

It’s one of the intriguing moments in the early episodes of the latest season of The Crown and was one of the big questions in the years soon after Princess Diana’s death: Was the iconic princess secretly engaged to Dodi Fayed, or had he bought a ring preparing to propose?

In the final season of the Netflix show, the first episodes of which hit the streaming service on Thursday, Dodi proposes to Princess Diana in Paris just hours before their tragic death in a car crash. However, the royal turns him down, saying she's not ready.

The question of their possible engagement became vitally important even 10 years after the couple's 1997 fatal crash in Paris when it formed part of the inquest into Princess Diana's death (along with the question of whether Diana was pregnant — she wasn’t). That's because Dodi’s bitter father, Mohamed al-Fayed (who died earlier this year), claimed it was one of the reasons behind the establishment plot to kill the couple.

Firstly, were Diana and Dodi, who had only got together earlier in that summer, in love? Richard Kay, a senior Daily Mail journalist who was close to the princess, wrote poignantly of a last call she made to him only hours before the fateful drive away from the Ritz hotel in Paris. In his moving reflections, written a day after her death (and reproduced in the book of tributes Requiem), he said she was "as happy as I have ever known her."

Related: All About Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana's Love Interest at the Time of Their Deaths

He added, "I cannot say for certain that they would have married, but in my view, it was likely.” (Kay later told the inquest into her death in 2007 that he had changed his mind on that.)

Princess Diana talked excitedly about seeing her sons, Prince William, then 15, and Prince Harry, then 12, who were holidaying in Balmoral with their father, Prince Charles.

“ 'I’m coming home tomorrow, and the boys will be back from Scotland in the evening,' "she told him. (Sadly, she would also call her sons that night and they’d talk to her for the last time.)

But was she about to agree to marry again? The Crown shows the couple looking around a jewelry store while hiding out from photographers in Monte Carlo, and it is known that Dodi did, indeed, buy a diamond ring at the Repossi shop in Place Vendome, Paris for around $14,000. Was he going to give it to her at his flat, where they were headed on the night of their deaths? If it was an engagement ring, it wasn’t particularly expensive for a man of his means – “something of a let-down for such a big spender,” as Kay would put it 20 years later.

However, Dodi did appear to have been planning something special. Rene Delorm, his butler, said he was asked that evening to have “the champagne on ice when they returned to the apartment,” Lord Justice Scott Baker, conducting the official inquest into the couple’s deaths, summed up in 2007. They never reached it.

The inquest into the couple’s deaths was conducted with forensic detail 10 years after the night that shocked the world. Ostensibly tasked with ruling how Diana and Dodi died, it also looked into all the circumstances around the tragedy. One of those was to assess the couple’s relationship, which had become such a bone of contention as Mohamed al-Fayed believed it was the root of the establishment’s —  and the royals' — reason for wanting the couple dead.

The presiding judge, Lord Justice Scott Baker, called many of Princess Diana's closest friends, staff and advisers. One, her butler Paul Burrell, said that Diana had told him she’d needed "marriage like a bad rash" (a phrase also echoed by her friend Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who’d asked the princess, " 'You are not doing anything silly, are you?' Diana's response was that she needed marriage like a rash on her face,” Baker said in his inquest.)

It must be remembered that not only was Dodi coming out of a relationship with American model Kelly Fisher (who claimed that he had proposed to her), Princess Diana had only recently finished an intense relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

Khan was, for many of her friends, Diana’s last true love. But, like so much in the princess’s life, it was complicated and complex.

The Dodi relationship has been described to me several times over the years as a “summer fling.” And yet the signals picked up by close friends were at odds with the princess’s own romantic gesture of giving Dodi her late father’s cufflinks, underlining perhaps how close she’d become to him.

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In the raw, immediate hours after the shocking news from Paris, Kay wrote, “In her two sons — and latterly in Dodi — she saw the only men in her life who had never let her down and never wanted from her anything except her being herself.”

Her planned reunion with Prince William and Prince Harry never took place, of course, and we'll never know what the future would have held for the couple.

But what is certain: an engagement hadn’t taken place by the time the couple left The Ritz hotel being pursued by paparazzi.

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