The brief romance of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed has been glamorized for over 25 years. What’s so frequently left out of the narrative, which is explored on the fifth and sixth seasons of The Crown, is the existence of a third party. While Dodi was embarking on a very high profile relationship with Diana, Kelly Fisher, a model originally from Kentucky, was trying desperately to figure out what was going on.
Fisher, who is portrayed by Erin Richards in the show, said that she and Dodi were engaged, living a newly-purchased Malibu home and planning a wedding set for August 1997, when he met Diana, Dominick Dunne reported in a 2008 Vanity Fair story. On July 14 of that summer, the pair were in Paris when Dodi’s father asked him to join Diana and her sons on the Fayed family yacht, where they were vacationing. A few days later, Dunne wrote, Dodi asked her to fly to St. Tropez where she spent days on a second Fayed yacht and Dodi went between the two boats. This is depicted in the beginning of The Crown season 6, part 1.
Khalid Abdalla and Salim Daw as Dodi and Mohamed Al-Fayed in The Crown.
Any secrecy about Dodi and Diana’s relationship went out the window when the Sunday Mirror published a photo of them kissing on August 10. Days later, Fisher, represented by lawyer Gloria Allred, filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Dodi. The suit was announced at a Los Angeles press conference. “We would like the Princess, who has suffered greatly in the past, to know of Ms. Fisher’s experiences with Mr. Fayed so that she can make an informed decision regarding her future and that of her children,” Allred said. Allred also said that Fisher was willing to meet with Diana “anywhere in the world on a confidential basis.”
Fisher alleged that Dodi had given her a diamond and sapphire ring worth $233,000. She also said that he had offered her $500,000 for her to leave her work in order to be with him more, but he’d offered only $60,000 and a $200,000 check that bounced.
On September 2, following Dodi’s death, Fisher dropped the suit. Allred said, “Kelly suffered greatly because of the break up with Mr, Fayed. She was engaged to him, and they had planned to marry Aug. 9, 1997. Kelly loved Dodi very much, and she is devastated by his loss, and that of Princess Diana. Nothing is more important than the life of a human being. In the light of this enormous tragedy, Kelly forgives Dodi for all of his past injustices against her.”
According to People, Fisher later married pilot Mikhail Movshina, whom she met in 2007 on a safari in the Central African Republic. The couple moved to Paris, then the Swiss Alps. When she became pregnant in 2010, they moved to Aiken, South Carolina and welcomed a daughter the following year.
This story has been updated.
Features Editor
Adrienne Gaffney is the features editor at ELLE and previously worked at WSJ Magazine and Vanity Fair.