When Princess Diana died unexpectedly and tragically in an August 31, 1997 car accident, she and longtime friend and sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson weren’t on speaking terms.
According to biographer Andrew Lownie, who wrote the book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, the two women’s longstanding friendship reportedly fell out after Ferguson published her 1996 autobiography, My Story, “in which she referred to catching a verruca [wart] from borrowing some shoes from Lady Diana.”
“In fact, the reality was that Diana was very concerned that Sarah Ferguson might well be selling stories about her, and that relationship was never repaired, though Sarah Ferguson pretended it had,” he told The Daily Mailon May 28.
Diana and Sarah were distant cousins and friends from the time they were teenagers; it was Diana who introduced Sarah to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then known as Prince Andrew, whom Sarah married in 1986. Diana had married Prince Charles in 1981, five years prior.
“Diana would come to Sarah Ferguson every Sunday, and they would moan about the royal family,” Lownie said. “They both felt very restricted within the confines of the royal family. But at the same time, there were some concerns Diana had that Fergie was perhaps too boisterous, and she was kind of undermining Diana’s own reputation, and she began to distance herself.”
Lownie also claimed that Diana pulled a “tough trick” on Sarah by saying they should both divorce their husbands at the same time. Both women separated from their respective husbands in 1992 and finalized their divorces in 1996. Diana, Lownie added, “let Sarah Ferguson do it on her own and basically learned from how the royal family treated Sarah Ferguson about how she would handle the divorce herself.”
Sarah previously told People in 2021, “Diana and I both had our own mental health issues, and she and I used to talk. She said, ‘Fergie, remember one thing: When you’re at the top of the pedestal, it’s so easy to fall off. And you’re at the bottom. You just climb up.’”
In her 2011 memoir Finding Sarah, Sarah wrote that the two women hadn’t spoken for a year before Diana’s death. “I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something stuck in her head, it stuck there for a while,” she wrote.
“I wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out,” she added. “And I knew she’d come back. In fact, the day before she died, she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.’”
“In any sibling relationship, there are ups and downs and peaks and troughs, but we were always steadfast in our friendship,” Sarah continued. “We never let the sun go down on too many heated discussions. Our bond was never broken.”
Sarah told Hello! in 2021 that she thinks about Diana “most days,” adding, “She’s the only other person who knew and was around at that time in the ‘80s, when we all wore those very strange clothes. She was in the family before me, and we had such fun.”
Sarah has recently been engulfed in scandal surrounding her and her ex-husband Andrew’s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Speaking to People, Lownie said that Sarah “will find it very hard to come back” from this scandal.
“She always thinks she can bounce back,” a friend told the outlet. “But this isn’t something that can blow over.”
