What Happened To Princess Diana's Trusted Inner Circle?

Long before her untimely death in 1997, people around the world were fascinated by Princess Diana. The woman who'd been born Lady Diana Spencer grew up to marry a future king, leading to a media frenzy the likes of which the world had never seen. Prince William and Prince Harry made the royal family even more of an object of international fascination, and then Princess Diana's shocking divorce from the future King Charles III took things to a whole new level.

When Princess Diana was killed in a car crash that year in Paris, fans clamored for any scrap of information they could learn about the former Princess of Wales. That meant the media fixated on anyone who had known her in life, digging through her past for private details about her struggle against the royal family's strict rules, looking into the several romantic relationships she took part in after she left the prince. Anyone who was part of Princess Diana's staff and her trusted inner circle found themselves hounded by public attention that was somehow even more intense than when their beloved princess had been alive.

Some chose to retreat from the spotlight, clinging fast to their private lives and only revealing information about Princess Diana long after her death. Others chose to open up, writing books about their time as part of the princess's trusted inner circle. Read on to learn what happened to members of her staff and her best friends after her death.

As the Princess of Wales, Princess Diana connected with several confidants in whom she could trust, people who would listen to her talk through the numerous issues in her marriage and in public life more broadly. One such confidant was Julia Samuel, a close friend who found herself reeling after Diana's death. "I remember clearly the shock I'd felt when she died. The pain and subsequent fury of missing her and wanting her back. My confusion when millions of people who didn't know her were sobbing hysterically in the streets," Samuel wrote in a piece for Time in 2018. "The heartbreaking image of her young sons, bereft, walking behind her coffin in silence."

After the public fascination with Diana's death, Samuel pivoted, becoming a grief counselor and a pediatric psychotherapist. Her experience counseling Princes William and Harry about the death of their mother changed her life, she said, and she wanted to help as many people as possible get through grief, too. As a result, she's written several self-help books to read during the grieving process.

Speaking with People in 2017, the godmother of Prince George said that the lessons she tried to teach Diana's sons were applicable to the broader public. "Whether you're a prince or a member of the public, how we experience grief is both universal and extremely personal," she said. "No position protects you against the pain of your loss."

Journalist Andrew Morton shocked the publishing world in 1992 when he released "Diana: Her True Story," a biography in her own words. On a series of tapes, she laid out her struggles and frustrations; to Morton's surprise, Princess Diana gave all the details about her relationship with the royal family, leaving no stone unturned.

After Diana's death, Morton confessed that the princess herself had been the source of the tapes. Speaking with People decades later, he said that the tapes had bowled him over when he first listened to them. "She talked about a woman called Camilla [Parker Bowles]. I'd never heard of her," Morton said, going on to share that she opened up to him about her eating disorder and mental health struggles. "I was staggered," he said.

Speaking with The New York Post in 2017, Morton confessed that they'd kept in touch in the years after the biography. "For me, the tragedy of her life is that in the final months, Diana had finally got her life together. She looked great, she had said goodbye to her former royal persona and was embracing a future as a glamorous and articulate humanitarian," he said. "A princess for the world rather than a Princess of Wales." Thanks to the runaway success of his book about Diana, Morton has written several other biographies, including books about Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill.

Princess Diana's heartbreaking funeral still stands as one of the most-watched television broadcasts in human history. Some estimates guess that 2.5 billion people watched the ceremony, which means that Elton John's performance of an updated version of "Candle in the Wind" might just be the most-watched musical performance of all time.

The singer behind hits like "Your Song" had been friends with Diana for decades, ever since they'd met at a royal dance. In his book "Me," John explained that the music at the party had been kept quiet so as not to disturb Queen Elizabeth II. That's when he met Diana. "We immediately clicked," he said. "We ended up pretending to dance the Charleston while hooting at the disco's feebleness."

After Diana's death, he was chosen to memorialize the Princess of Wales at her funeral. In his memoir, the pop star acknowledged that he was somewhat put off by the record-breaking success of the song, which topped the Billboard charts for months after her death. "Why would anyone want to listen to it? It seemed unhealthy to me: morbid and unnatural," John wrote. "I really didn't think it was what Diana would have wanted."

In 2021, London honored Princess Diana by erecting a plaque at the home where she lived in Earls Court when she met the future King Charles III. On hand to dedicate the plaque was Virginia Clarke, one of several young women who lived with Diana Spencer before she joined the royal family.

At the ceremony to honor her friend, Clarke revealed that she and her other flatmates barely received any guidance from the palace about how to deal with the sudden, intense media scrutiny that came from living with the girlfriend of a future king. Instead, they were simply told that they should be careful. "The only thing I remember being told was we should look under our cars for bombs. Sadly none of us had read the handbook for bomb spotting so we didn't know where to begin with that one," Clarke joked (via The Telegraph). "The situation was surreal."

Clarke, who lived a relatively private life in the wake of Princess Diana's death, said that she only realized later that their joyful taunting of the press had become something quite different toward the end of Diana's life. "Later in life when she dropped her royal status, it saddened me to realise she no longer had her friends around her," Clarke said, "and the cat and mouse game became very lonely and not quite so funny."

Both before and after Princess Diana died, the general public was fascinated by her life before the palace, before the prince, before the worldwide fame. To that end, Katherine Hanbury gave royal watchers a look back at Princess Diana's childhood when she auctioned off letters and photographs from their days as children together. In fact, Diana stayed in touch with Hanbury after she went and married the prince, and a letter written while on her honeymoon was one of the items Hanbury put up for auction in 2026. "We had a blissful honeymoon with endless sun and luckily calm seas," Diana wrote (via Fox News Digital).

Regaling the outlet with happy childhood memories, Hanbury cautioned people that they needed to keep the letter's context in mind when assessing how Diana felt about her marriage to the prince. "You have to remember she was so young. It was all a new playground for her," Hanbury told Fox News Digital in 2026. "I imagine she was thinking, 'I'm married, and now I'm a grown-up. I need to start my family.'" 

Hanbury ultimately decided to sell the memorabilia because she wanted to share this piece of the late princess' story with the world. "I've had these letters and photos in my desk for the last 45 years or so," she told Fox News Digital. "I'm not getting any younger, and I can't take them with me. I thought now is the time to give somebody else the opportunity to have the pleasure and the joy of looking at and reading them, as they gave to me." Per the Telegraph, the collection, which went up for auction in July 2026, was worth between £4,000 and £6,000 ($5,300 and $8,000 USD). 

Princess Diana's close friend James Colthurst, a doctor, was instrumental in bringing her story to the wider public. Colthurst is the one who served as Andrew Morton's interviewer, speaking with Princess Diana on tape and then delivering the resulting conversations to the biographer. After Diana's death, Colthurst never sought the public spotlight for himself.

Still, the man who had known her since she was a teenager continued to speak out over the years, commenting occasionally about the royal family. In 2018, for example, Colthurst wrote a piece about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding for The Telegraph, explaining that the Diana he once knew would have been proud of the way her son's life had turned out. "I think Diana would be hugely proud that Harry has taken what he learned from her and has not just continued with it but built on the foundation she helped to lay for him," he wrote. "He has inherited her gift for the human touch and displayed it again and again."

In 2021, he wrote another piece for The Telegraph, on what would have been her birthday. "I felt, when she joined the Royal family, she may not have been fully aware of the machine she was in," Colthurst reflected. "The Firm, for its part, was unaccustomed to having a superstar in its midst, and I don't think it knew how to cope with the enormous amount of publicity she generated."

Andrew Morton wasn't the only journalist with whom Princess Diana struck up a close relationship as she navigated the turmoil of life in the public eye. An American writer named Katharine Graham, best known as the publisher of the Washington Post, became one of Princess Diana's closest friends, and the two kept in regular communication whenever one would visit the other's country.

Graham reflected on their relationship in a piece shortly after Diana's death. "She quickly realized I would protect her privacy. I also spoke my mind pretty freely, which amused her and which she liked," Graham wrote for Newsweek. She described a friendship built on honest and open communication about the future, describing conversations about the princess's loneliness as she contemplated a future away from the royal family that had made her life so miserable.

Graham's brand of journalism was high-minded stuff, so she was disturbed by the reported actions of paparazzi during the crash that killed the princess. "Princess Diana's death has brought the problems of celebrity culture into sharp relief. We all need to think hard about how to solve them," Graham wrote. "This tragedy need not and should not have happened. The world should not have had to suffer the sudden extinction of a real star."

Princess Diana didn't have too many allies within the royal family, but the aristocracy was another story. Diana looked up to a socialite named Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who told Tatler in 2019, "I suppose I was a mother figure to her. We were very close and when she died it was a blow." She said that even after her divorce, Diana used to bring Prince William and Prince Harry over to visit more weekends than not, which meant the two kept up on each other's lives until the very end.

According to The Guardian, Lady Annabel Goldsmith testified at the inquiry into Diana's death. She insisted that the Princess of Wales had no intention of marrying Dodi Al Fayed, recalling that her friend had said she wanted to get married again "like I need a rash on my face."

The aristocrat, who died in 2025, continued to be involved in British society in the decades that followed the loss of her friend. She founded a group called Democracy Movement, which opposed Britain's involvement in the European Union. Despite her isolationist international political views, she maintained that her personal life was another story. "I'm not anti-European –- my husband was half-European and my children are a quarter French," she said.

Reportedly, Princess Diana was afraid for her safety following her divorce from the future King Charles III. Leaving the royal family like that was a shock rarely seen in British society, and she became nervous that her husband's family would try to harm her for speaking out against the way The Firm ran things.

As she found her independence away from the prying eyes of the palace, Princess Diana struck up a relationship with Dr. Hasnat Khan, a surgeon. They dated for two years in secret, only breaking things off when Diana moved on with Dodi Al Fayed. In Edward White's 2025 book called "Dianaworld," Khan opened up about realizing that the Princess of Wales was leaving him for the heir to a shopping fortune. "I remember saying to her at the time, 'You are dead,' meaning her reputation was dead. I said this because I was sure that it was someone from Mohamed Al Fayed's group," Khan recalled, "and that was how I felt about anyone involved with him." Ultimately, Khan returned to his native Pakistan, where he continued to practice medicine.

There were plenty of rumors about the death of Princess Diana that swirled for years following the shocking accident that took her life. Many royal watchers speculated that she might have been killed, perhaps in an attempt to silence her criticism of the royal family. If that were the case, you might expect that the only survivor of the crash, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, might be able to provide some insight ... but after he witnessed the death of his charge, Rees-Jones lived a relatively private life.

Well, mostly. First — only a few years after the crash — Rees-Jones published "The Bodyguard's Story," a memoir of his time guarding Dodi Al Fayed, Princess Diana's frequent partner in those later years, who also died in the crash. In a 2000 interview with "60 Minutes," Rees-Jones insisted that he didn't initially realize his charge was dating the former princess. "I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out the couple had gone away for one or two trips together," he insisted.

Speaking with The Guardian in 2000, Rees-Jones confessed that he was hurt by Al Fayed's father pushing the conspiracy theories that the crash had been orchestrated. Still, he said, he only had fond memories of Princess Diana. "What surprised me was how ordinary and natural she was," Rees-Jones recalled. "She was the sort of lady I'd be willing to take down the pub, and that's as big a compliment as I can say."