Did Princess Diana Really Plan to Move to California?
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When we think of the royal family and California we instantly think of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle who have made the state their home since walking away from royal duties in 2020. However, it seems that the seeds of a royal life stateside were sewn with the previous generation, as it has been claimed that Princess Diana planned to live in California before her tragic death.
The suggestion that Diana was hoping for a life in the Golden State has resurfaced in season six of The Crown, which premiered on November 16. During a scene with Dodi Al Fayed, Diana tells him about the media, “You know it’s getting worse for me too. They make like they’re your friend, and they write insult after insult anyway. Makes me want to just move away. Start afresh. Move to another country. Somewhere like…” “California,” Dodi interjects. “Exactly,” Diana replies. “Away from England anyway. Somewhere where one can actually be free.”
It's important to be clear that there is no hard evidence that Diana had made such plans; there are no letters or other documentation to that effect and no interviews with the Princess herself on this subject. Yet, the claims have credibility as multiple people close to her strongly believe that this really was the case.
While promoting his 2003 book A Royal Duty, Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell claimed that the Princess was indeed planning to move to Malibu with her sons and that she even had plans for a house drawn up. "A lovely house … saw all the plans for it. It was going to be in Malibu," Burrell told Good Morning America in 2003. "We sat on the floor, spread out all the maps and the layout of the house…She said, 'This is our new life, just won't it be great, think of the lifestyle the boys — nobody's judgmental here in America.’” The former butler repeated his claims in recent years when interviewed about Harry and Meghan’s 2020 move, “I remember she set out in her sitting room the plans of a home in Malibu, California, the former home of Julie Andrews,” he told Inside Edition. “And she said to me ‘I’m buying this house.’”
Diana’s former bodyguard Lee Sansum told Inside Edition while promoting his 2022 book Protecting Diana that the Princess told him she wanted to move to the US during conversations held the summer before her death. “She was going to the states. And she told me she liked the people in the states. She liked the way she was treated there, she liked the way the press treated her,” he said. When asked by the reporter whether Diana told him she wanted to move to the US, Sansum replied, “Yes, she was going to stay there.”
Perhaps most crucially however, Prince Harry himself believes that his mother was headed stateside and specifically to California. “This is one of the places where I think my mum was probably going to end up living. Potentially,” he said at the close of his 2022 Netflix documentary when he was driving towards his Montecito home. The Prince declined to elaborate on why he held this opinion and we will never know whether, had she lived, Diana’s US plans would have been realized. But it appears entirely credible that she did indeed have the intention of making the move.
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