'The Crown' Allegedly Fabricated Mohamed Al-Fayed's Role In Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed Romance: 'Total Nonsense'
The final season of "The Crown" features Princess Diana's relationship with Dodi Fayed and how the latter's father allegedly played a matchmaker for the pair, which his former spokesperson denied.
"The Crown" Season 6 follows Princess Diana losing and finding love. It highlights the last eight weeks of her life, including her happy times with Fayed. The show also features the late Egyptian business mogul seemingly engineering the royal romance, allegedly as part of his ambition to obtain British citizenship and his former spokesperson Michael Cole, who already refuted the allegation in 1997, spoke up once more, denying it, even calling Al-Fayed's involvement in Princess Diana and Fayed's relationship a "total nonsense."
"Mohamed was a remarkable man in many ways. He was delighted that his eldest son and his family's dear friend Diana were together. But making two people fall in love with each other? That was beyond even his great talents," Cole told Deadline.
He also reminded the public that the show is not a documentary but a dramatized fiction, which he agrees with.
"Netflix and the production company describe 'The Crown' as 'dramatized fiction,' and I am not going to disagree with that characterization. That means it is made up," he added.
In the opening episode, Al-Fayed (Salim Dau) re-introduces Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) on his yacht, Jonikal. Then he instructs his son, Fayed, to woo the late Princess of Wales, telling him that pursuing the royal would make him proud.
In Episode 2, Al-Fayed asks a maid if Fayed and Princess Diana are "intimate." The Netflix drama also suggests that he commissioned Italian photographer Mario Brenna to snap photos of Princess Diana and Fayed during their trip.
However, British journalist Tina Brown claimed in her 2022 book "The Palace Papers" that Prince William and Prince Harry's mother tipped off Brenna to capture the intimate photos to allegedly "send a taunting message" to her lover Hasnat Khan.
Vanity Fair staff writer and royals expert Erin Vanderhoof also addressed the different accounts about how Brenna was hired and noted that it remains unclear who really paid the photographer.
"There's a lot of debate about who put Mario Brenna up to that," Vanderhoof said before sharing Brown's theory that Princess Diana did it to "make her other ex-boyfriend, Hasnat Khan, jealous."
"There's a lot of debate about whether it was somebody close to Dodi, somebody close to Diana. It's one of those things that cannot really be definitively proven," she concluded.
The first four episodes of "The Crown" Season 6 now stream on Netflix. The second part of the final season will arrive on Dec. 14.
