“I want to go to the US and live there to get away from all this. At least in America they like me and they will leave me alone,” she is reported to have said
Princess Diana was planning to move to the United States without her sons just weeks before she died, one of her former bodyguards has claimed.
According to the Daily Mail, in his memoir, Protecting Diana, A Bodyguard’s Story, Lee Sansum recounts how the princess was going to announce to the press her plans to move to America in a bid to protect William and Harry from the media coverage of her relationship and holiday with Dodi Al Fayette in Saint Tropez in July 1997.
The family was staying on the luxury yacht of businessman Mohamed Al Fayed as paparazzi surrounded the boat daily, according to Sansom who had taken over their protection during that time.
“The press was the bane of her life everywhere, not just in St. Tropez,” writes Sansom, who adds that the Princess told him, “I can’t do anything in the UK. The newspapers there attack me no matter what I do.”
According to Sansum then Diana told him “I want to go to the US and live there to get away from all this. At least in America they like me and will leave me alone.”
Sansum describes that he remembers asking Diana if her sons would come with her, and she explained that she would never be allowed to take them with her because then they would not be able to carry out their royal duties.
Indeed Diana is quoted as saying, “I’ll probably only be able to see them in the school holidays.”
As Sansum writes in his memoirs: “You could say that Diana was a wonderful mother, so loving and attentive to her two boys, but it seemed as if she had to leave them both back in the UK to escape the press, relentlessly hounding every detail of the days of her life.
“It was a decision she felt she had to make as well to release them from all the attention they were getting when they were with her.”
Finally, after a few days on holiday, Sansum writes, Diana announced that she intended to announce to the press that she was leaving the UK for good.
As he recounts, he had been afraid as already at that time the princess was consistently one of the biggest topics on the news agenda of the tabloids and he estimated that this announcement might draw even more press attention to her.
“Her every step would be followed by paparazzi desperate to take pictures of her as she prepared to leave everything behind to escape to America.”
After all, the princess, shortly after her conversation with her bodyguard did speak to the media but said nothing about a possible move to the US.
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