Prince Harry Believed for Years That Princess Diana Faked Her Own Death | He Needed “Proof She Was Injured”

Harry is opening up about his mother's death in a way he never has before. Raw, candid, and heartbreaking, the 38-year-old Duke of Sussex believed for “many years” that his mother, Princess Diana, may have faked her death. Both he and his older brother Prince William thought she had wanted to spend time away from the constant scrutiny of the media and that she would later come back for her children and take them with her. “I just refused to accept that she was gone,” Harry told Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday. For years he believed his mother was not dead and had “decided to disappear for a time.” He held onto an unflinching kind of hope that she would return to her boys. But she never did.

His new book Spare is creating quite a buzz around the world and Harry wants to share his story from his perspective. Not the media. Not through royal commentators. Not through family members. But directly from the horse's mouth. "I don't want to tell anyone what to think of it and that includes my family. This book and its truths are in many ways a continuation of my own mental health journey. It's a raw account of my life — the good, the bad and everything in between," he told PEOPLE.

Reading an excerpt from Harry's new book Spare, Cooper said, “You write in the book, you say, ‘I’d often say it to myself first thing in the morning, maybe this is the day. Maybe this is the day that she’s gonna reappear.’” He replied, "Yeah, hope. I had huge amounts of hope."

"Maybe this is all part of a plan,” Harry said he once thought adding that his brother had similar thoughts too. Speaking of her final moments he said he need proof that it indeed happened the way it did. “There were so many gaps and so many holes in it,” Harry said. He added that the siblings once "considered reopening the inquest" due to a lack of clarity. At the age of just 20, he even asked to see photos of the fatal car crash in Paris that killed his mother in 1997. “The last thing Mummy saw was a flash bulb,” Harry writes chillingly in his book. He said he needed “proof she was injured,” and “proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the very ones taking photographs of her lying half dead.” 

Cooper asked Harry if that's what he saw in the pictures to which he replied, "Well, they were— the pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window, and the reflection on the window was— was them."

"You could actually see the photographers in the reflection?" Cooper asked. Harry saw only a few photos as his private secretary and adviser told him not to hurt himself by looking at more. "All I saw was the back of my mum's head slumped on the back seat," Harry said. "There were other more gruesome photographs, but I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that. Because that's the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind forever."

References:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prince-harry-interview-transcript-60-minutes-2023-01-08/

https://people.com/royals/prince-harry-spare-memoir-raw-account-good-bad-everything-between-interview/

Cover Image Source: Getty Images | (L) Leon Neal; (R) Keystone/Hulton Archive