Content Advisory: This article discusses fatal crashes, paparazzi pursuit, and the deaths of Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Carolyn Bessette. Reader discretion is advised.
Princess Diana’s letter to John F. Kennedy Jr. now reads with a haunting weight.
In Caroline Hallemann’s upcoming book, ‘The Kennedys and the Windsors: The Story of Two Dynasties, One Born, One Made’, a February 1997 note from Diana to JFK Jr. reveals that she was worried about the media pressure surrounding him and his wife, Carolyn Bessette.
The timing is hard to ignore. Diana wrote the note just months before her own death in Paris. “I hope the media are leaving both you and Carolyn alone,” Diana reportedly wrote. “I know how difficult it is, but believe it or not, the worst paparazzi are here in Europe!” According to the excerpt, Diana underlined the word “hope.”
Princess Diana Warned JFK Jr. About Paparazzi
Diana and JFK Jr. first met in 1995 at the Carlyle Hotel in New York to discuss the possibility of her appearing on the cover of ‘George’ magazine.
She politely declined the cover, but JFK Jr. reportedly continued trying to secure an interview with her afterward. Her 1997 letter suggested she had not fully closed the door. The timing just was not right.
More than a business note, though, the letter showed Diana understood the pressure JFK Jr. and Carolyn were facing.
All three were among the most photographed people of the 1990s. Diana was stalked by tabloids before and after her divorce from then-Prince Charles. JFK Jr. and Carolyn were also under constant scrutiny as their courtship and marriage became a public obsession.
Diana’s Words Became Eerie Months Later
In August 1997, Diana died from injuries sustained in a car crash in Paris after her vehicle was pursued by paparazzi. Her partner, Dodi Fayed, and the driver died at the scene. Diana’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived with serious injuries.
Diana was later pronounced dead at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. She was 36.
That makes her warning to JFK Jr. feel even more chilling now. She was not speaking abstractly about media pressure. She was living it.
Less than two years later, JFK Jr. and Carolyn also died in a tragedy that stunned the world. In July 1999, the couple and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren Bessette, were killed in a plane crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. They had been traveling from New Jersey to Massachusetts, with plans to drop Lauren off before heading to Cape Cod for Rory Kennedy’s wedding.
Their bodies were later recovered from the ocean floor. Officials determined they died on impact.
Diana And JFK Jr. Shared A Strange Public Burden
Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson said the princess may have recognized something familiar in JFK Jr.
“She saw in him a fellow victim, if you can put it that way, of life in the public eye and difficulty of knowing who to trust,” Jephson said, according to Hallemann’s book.
He added that it created “an affinity” between them, if not exactly a bond.
That may be why Diana’s letter now feels so unsettling. She was warning another famous target about the paparazzi, while unknowingly standing months away from the tragedy that would define the cost of that obsession.
‘The Kennedys and the Windsors: The Story of Two Dynasties, One Born, One Made’ is set for release June 2.
