![]() ![]() She claimed that while Diana was on one Fayed yacht she and Dodi were on another, making love. (Exhibit A: a check for $200,000 that he had written to her on a closed account.)įisher sold her story to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and the Sun for an estimated $300,000 to $450,000. Having suffered the demise of an engagement sealed with a sapphire-and-diamond ring, Fisher accused Dodi of failing to pay her $440,000 in “premarital support” which, she claimed, he had pledged in return for her giving up modeling. The biggest splash came in mid-August when a sobbing 31-year-old model named Kelly Fisher sued Dodi after he jilted her to take up with Diana. She also claimed that he once threatened her with a nine-mm. One account, from model/actress Traci Lind, alleged that during their affair they used nicknames (Bruisey and Gippo) and fought “like children,” trading pushes and slaps. ![]() Dodi was accused of failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent, wrecking rental properties, selling film rights he didn’t own, and neglecting to pay attorneys, doctors, repairmen, and even his projectionist. If Diana was reading the tabloids closely, as she was known to do, she likely learned a lot. When his romance with Diana hit the headlines on August 7, Dodi suddenly faced the kind of scrutiny that even members of royal families are ill-prepared to withstand. He was seen as someone who lacked the drive-or, more flatteringly, the ruthlessness-to make it on his own. He was charming and generous, but his good intentions couldn’t dislodge his reputation for reneging on commitments and creditors. Had the Princess actually married Dodi and settled, as some speculated she might, in Paris, she would probably have lost favor, even with the masses.ĭodi Fayed was a 42-year-old man/child with a lavish monthly allowance-by most accounts $100,000. Her mystique rested not only on her glamour and vulnerability but also on her monarchical and aristocratic associations. What Diana may have been slow to fully appreciate was that her relationship with Fayed’s son would almost certainly have dimmed her place in the British imagination. In July, due to the recent delivery of further defense material, the case was adjourned from its scheduled hearing and is now fixed for September 1998.) ( Vanity Fair is involved in libel litigation with Mohamed Al Fayed, arising out of a September 1995 article. Fayed’s revelations of Tory Party “sleaze” contributed to Labour’s landslide last spring. Later, Mohamed Al Fayed drew further enmity after revealing that he had paid prominent Conservative members of Parliament to raise questions relating to his business interests in the House of Commons. Forever.ĭiana is now sealed into the collective memory, and not with Prince Charles, the father of her sons and source of much of her unhappiness, but with a man who had been at her side for all of three weeks, a man scarcely known outside certain rarefied precincts of London, Manhattan, and Hollywood until his name burst into the tabloid press in August when he publicly became Diana’s consort.Īfter being denied British citizenship, Dodi’s father had bitterly cited racism. ![]() The messages offered impassioned variations on a single theme: Dodi and Diana, star-crossed lovers, united in eternity. But the Harrods window still drew throngs of mourners bearing notes and fresh bouquets. Here, years earlier, the sphinx heads along the molding had been cast in what appear to be the likeness of one man: Mohamed Al Fayed, the store’s billionaire owner, and the father of Dodi.ĭiana and Dodi had died in a high-speed car crash 10 days earlier. Behind her was the store’s famous Egyptian Hall. In the background, a bejeweled mannequin in Egyptian robes and headdress stroked a golden harp as if beckoning the portraits heavenward. The giant photographs, sized two by one and a half feet, were larger than life in their gilded frames: Diana, the Princess of Wales, was radiant, and Emad “Dodi” Fayed, in open-necked sport shirt, looked equally relaxed among arrangements of lilies and trailing ivy in one of the main windows of Harrods on London’s Brompton Road. ![]()
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