Did Mohamed Al-Fayed Kick Off Dodi Fayed & Princess Diana's Romance?

The sixth season of Netflix's "The Crown," focuses a lot on Princess Diana's relationship with Dodi Fayed and the events that led to their untimely death in 1997. Since "The Crown" debuted on Netflix in 2016, fans have had difficulty separating fact from fiction when it comes to the lives of the royals. Buckingham Palace has not made any comments about the matter, but that hasn't stopped critics from looking at the series for hidden clues and Easter eggs, or bashing the show altogether for missing some of the real details that have been left out of certain stories. 

That said, there's a lot of controversy surrounding the history and timeline of Princess Diana and Dodi's relationship (as detailed by Deadline) and whether or not the Egyptian businessman's father Mohamed Al-Fayed might have had a hand in kicking off their romance. Princess Diana was friends with Mohamed long before she met his son, Dodi, according to People. He is said to have introduced himself to the Princess of Wales sometime in the late 1980s while she was still married to the then-prince, Charles. But it's been suggested by "The Crown" that he might have pushed his son Dodi to marry the princess, too.

In the sixth season of "The Crown," the series hints that Mohamed might have encouraged his son Dodi to court Princess Diana during the summer of 1997 because he wanted to obtain British citizenship through Diana and Dodi's future marriage. The New York Post says that Mohamed might have had a hand in supposedly orchestrating his son Dodi's relationship with Diana by encouraging him to date the princess via several heated conversations between them. This, despite Dodi being engaged to his fiancée, model Kelly Fisher, at the time, per People. Even royal experts are not too pleased with Mohamed's portrayal in the series, with Robert Jobson telling Newsweek, "It's disrespectful and it's easy to attack the dead." Mohamed died on August 30, 2023, per The New York Times, just two months before "The Crown" Season 6 debuted on Netflix. 

While Mohamed might have been instrumental in making sure that Princess Diana and Dodi were well taken care of during their ill-fated trip to Paris, as he invited them to stay at an old home he owned that once belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, there might have been another reason why Diana was spending so much time with her new boyfriend that summer. And it had nothing to do with Mohamed. According to People, Princess Diana was in a very transitional period in her life when she met Dodi.

During the summer of 1997, Princess Diana was newly single, but she was also mending her broken heart after realizing that things wouldn't work out between her and Pakistani surgeon and cardiologist Hasnat Khan. Royal biographer Judy Wade says that Diana wanted to marry him even though the surgeon wasn't very comfortable with being in the spotlight. "She had this vision that together they could bridge east and west, crossing creeds and continents. They could save lives and make it a better world," Wade said (via People). 

Well, it seemed like the best thing for a person like Princess Diana after a royal divorce and a romance gone wrong was a frolic in the Mediterranean. That is exactly what she did on board Mohamed Al-Fayed's yacht with his son, Dodi Fayed. Diana also allegedly wanted to make Hasnat jealous with her Dodi romance, as speculated by the New York Post. The rest, as they say, is history, as Diana and Dodi's vacation ended in a car crash in a Paris tunnel and their untimely deaths on the night of August 30, 1997. Mohamed, meanwhile, was never granted U.K. citizenship before he died, even though he had applied twice in 1995 and in 1999, per The Guardian.