Di's Ex-Lover's New Feat
By Stephen M. Silverman
10/16/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT
What a guy. Princess Diana's former lover, James Hewitt (the cad who loves to tell all), got drunk in a Paris restaurant and then re-enacted the high-speed car chase that ended in the collision that claimed the lives of Diana and two others. Hewitt told GQ magazine that he and four women friends got tanked over lunch and that he thought he was "about as drunk" as driver Henri Paul (who was behind the wheel of the fatal car). As one of his lunch companions had a Mercedes, Hewitt said that he "got the girls into the (car), jumped in the driver's seat and started bombing around . . . until we got to the underpass where (Diana) died." Hewitt, even in his drunken state, concluded that the crash that took Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul was a cold-blooded hit. "I don't care how drunk you are," Hewitt told GQ. "There's no way you'd hit that pillar unless something happened to make you veer off the road. It was definitely a set-up."
- In related news, Mohamed Al Fayed, the father of the late Dodi Fayed, has lost in his attempt to block Britain's Daily Telegraph from publishing excerpts from a book by Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana's bodyguard and the only survivor of the deadly 1997 crash. Al Fayed claimed Rees-Jones was contractually forbidden from profiting from information obtained during his employment by the Fayeds. In "The Bodyguard's Story," Rees-Jones, who dismisses claims by Al Fayed that his son Dodi and Diana were planning to marry, takes issue with Al Fayed's accusations of a royal conspiracy.
