Exclusive: Author Says Princess Diana Was "Groomed and Gaslighted" in Events That Could've Been Written By a "Drug-Fueled Hollywood Script Writer"

November 20, 1995 marked Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip's 48th wedding anniversary, but on the same night, the Royal Family was faced with one of its biggest scandals when Princess Diana's Panorama interview aired. In the extraordinary 54-minute BBC program, Diana confessed everything from adultery to self-harm to bulimia, even sharing that she didn't think Prince Charles was fit to become King. But it was later revealed that BBC journalist Martin Bashir used deceitful tactics to convince Diana into sitting down with him—a choice author Andy Webb says shaped royal history forever and, in part, contributed to Diana's 1997 death.

Webb, a documentary filmmaker and former BBC journalist, released his new book Dianarama on Tuesday, November 25. He tells Marie Claire that he decided to tell the story behind Bashir, the BBC and Diana after having "long, long been convinced that there is a terrible story here which has not nearly been told in full."

Bashir, who was relatively unknown at the time, approached Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, before meeting the princess, and Webb shares that it shocked him when he first learned "the complexity and the sinister nature of the plan that [Bashir] had devised in order to get Diana to sit down for him."

Bashir turned to a graphic designer who'd worked with the BBC to create fake bank statements showing that Diana's trusted private secretary, Patrick Jephson, was being paid off to spy on her, and claimed that The King (then Prince Charles) was having an affair with Prince William and Prince Harry's nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Bashir even created a false document trying to prove that Legge-Bourke had an abortion after becoming pregnant with Charles's baby—a move that Earl Spencer told Webb hugely influenced to Diana's mental state at the time.

"That plan involved the most extraordinary things like creating the fiction that Prince Charles wanted Diana to be murdered," Webb says, adding that it was "not just Diana, but [a plan] to take out Camilla, who's now the Queen of England."

He continues, "It's bizarre. I mean, if there was some drug-fueled script writer in Hollywood, and he said: 'I've got a story here. The King of England, he's gonna hire a hitman. He's going to take out the Queen.' You'd say, 'No, thank you very much.' But it's true."

Explaining how Princess Diana had all these "weird and bizarre" things in her head that she believed at the time, Webb tells Marie Claire, "Nowadays in 2025, we use words like she was 'groomed' and she was 'gaslighted' and all of these things, and you say to yourself, 'Yeah, I get it now.'"

Calling Bashir a "predatory male," the Dianarama author says, "He saw that the way in was to frighten her sufficiently," adding that this "was in fact the key element in his plot...Diana's terror that her kids would be taken and effectively given to this young 30-year-old nanny."

Of course, Diana—whose mental state was already fragile due to the breakdown of her marriage and distrust of the royal machine—didn't know at the time that she was being fed lies. And for decades, the world was unaware that the BBC knew about Bashir's tactics and covered them up.

In Dianarama, Webb reveals the lengths the BBC has gone to over the years to prevent documents pertaining to the Panorama interview from becoming public, and he tells Marie Claire that his biggest unanswered question is exactly "the degree to which the BBC knew" about the situation when questions came to light in 1996.

Although an inquest was held into Bashir and the Panorama interview in 2021 that proved the journalist used deceitful tactics on Diana, there are many questions that remain unanswered. And for Earl Spencer and others close to Diana, they believe she never would've been in Paris without royal protection on the night she died if she hadn't done the interview. It's a situation that Webb says is understood to be "an open wound which will not heal" for Prince William.

"In my view the BBC has a duty of care to him whether he's royal or whether he's not," Webb says. "He's a member of the public who deserves answers in what happened with his mother who died all those years ago."

The author continues that William "does have people that he's instructed to find out what they can. And he is also, I can tell you, fully, fully aware of what I've been doing and has let it be known that he is fully, fully supportive, so that, you know, speaks for itself."