20 YEARS AFTER DIANA'S DEATH, THE PAPARAZZI CONTINUE TO STALK

Plus ça change! 

Despite the uproar following Diana’s death, France’s paparazzi continue to stalk the rich and famous

By Tom Sancton

Paris, August 26, 2017

No one can forget the night of August 31, 1997. Pursued at high speed by a relentless pack of paparazzi, the black Mercedes bearing Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed struck the 13^th pillar of Paris’s Alma tunnel and crashed into a concrete wall. Fayed was killed instantly. Diana, despite a heroic effort to save her life, died on the operating table four hours later. Blame focused immediately on the paparazzi who had chased the couple on motorcycles then crawled all over their smashed vehicle snapping photos and jostling one another for position. Ten photojournalists were arrested that night and later charged with manslaughter and failing to aid persons in danger.

            But another factor soon emerged:  an autopsy of the Mercedes’s deceased driver, Ritz Hotel security chief Henri Paul, revealed that he was drunk and under the influence of prescription drugs at the time of the crash.  If that fact relieved the photographers of the legal responsibility for the accident—all charges against them were eventually dropped—it did little to change the public perception that these camera-slinging cowboys had hounded the Princess to her death.

            Despite widespread calls to rein in the reckless methods of the paparazzi, little has changed in the intervening 20 years. The French celebrity press—magazines like Paris Match, Voici, Gala, and VSD—continue to thrive on stolen images of the rich and famous, and daredevil photographers keep shooting them. “The paparazzi calmed down for six months after the accident, then they started back up again,” says Alain Toucas, Diana’s former lawyer, who currently represents the royal family of Monaco.  “We hoped the situation would improve, but in fact it’s gotten worse.”

Even before the death of the Princess, France had one of the Europe’s strongest laws against invasion of privacy. The French civil code states that “everyone has a right to respect of their private life” and accords to each individual the right to control his or her own image. The problem is that the celebrity magazines continue to publish paparazzi photos and, when they are sued, simply pay the fines and make up for the cost through boosted sales. Though the law is strict on paper, it has little deterrent effect. “I continue to pursue all those who violate the private lives of my clients,” says Toucas. “But our efforts have little success. We receive minimal damage payments, but we have failed to put an end to these abuses.”

Bruno Mouron, one of France’s best-known paparazzi, agrees that the celebrity stalking continues unabated but laments that the business has changed since he started working in the 1970s. For one thing, it is nowhere as lucrative as it was in the pre-Diana days when a single photo could fetch six figures. “The prices are ten percent of what they were 20 years ago,” he says. “Now you’re lucky if you can get $5,000 for a photo.”

Mouron attributes that precipitous drop to a number of causes. “With Instagram and Smartphones, everyone can be a paparazzi. Celebrity photos are all over the Internet.” Another factor is that the so-called “people” magazines increasingly organize their own photo shoots, often with the express or tacit cooperation of the subject. Then there is the precarious state of print journalism in general: more and more publications are closing down and there is less money to spend on photos and reporting. Finally there is the competition of young, hungry photojournalists attracted by the adventure and willing to work cheap. “You don’t need a diploma to be a photographer,” Mouron grumbles. “With today’s digital cameras, the photos take themselves.”

Mouron waxes nostalgic about the old days. “It used to be a princely profession,” he says. “Travel, grand hotels, fancy restaurants. To photograph celebrities, we had to go to the same places they did. Now it’s a profession for bums—kids riding around on motor scooters and eating fast food. If I was 20 years old today, I’d never choose this profession. It no longer makes one dream.”

Alain Toucas is unmoved by such complaints: “Maybe it is less lucrative for the paparazzi—that’s not my problem—but it is just as bothersome to the people they stalk. And I am afraid that, one day, we will be confronted by another tragedy like Diana’s.”

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Tom Sancton and Scott MacLeod's 1998 bestseller is now available in an updated 20th anniversary edition.

 “Sancton and MacLeod…serve as textbook models of methodical reporting.”

             —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

 “A solid piece of work…Every eyewitness is interviewed; every lead followed up; every theory is explored.”

              —Roy Greenslade, The Guardian

“The definitive book on those final moments, days, hours, minutes and seconds of Diana’s life.”

               —Cindy Adams, New York Post

“[The authors] have done more in-depth reporting on this than just about anyone else.”

                                                           —Anderson Cooper, CNN

TO BUY DEATH OF A PRINCESS:

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PRINCESS MEETS HEIRESS IN THIS PARADE.COM INTERVIEW

In Princess Diana's Death and the Bettencourt Affair, Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction 

By Becky Hughes

August 8, 2017

The Bettencourt affair may be one of the wildest high-society scandals of all time, but few Americans know it by name. Tom Sancton, author of new page-turner The Bettencourt Affair (Dutton), first broke the story in the U.S. for Vanity Fair in 2010, uncovering this Parisian intrigue involving Liliane Bettencourt, the world’s richest woman and heiress to the enormous L’Oréal fortune, and François-Marie Banier, a charismatic artist, and the legal battle that ensued after Banier received hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from the aging heiress.

The Bettencourt Affair is not Sancton’s first foray into the world of celebrity scandal. After Princess Diana‘s tragic death in 1997, Sancton co-authored Death of a Princess, a deep journalistic dive to find the true story behind the circumstances of Diana’s death. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fatal crash, Sancton and co-author Scott MacLeod have updated Death of a Princess with all the latest information on the tragedy and its effects on the royal family today.

Parade caught up with Sancton to discuss the devastating loss of Princess Diana and the sensational story of the Bettencourt affair.

Twenty years after her death, what is Princess Diana’s legacy?

She’s kept this amazing aura she had—the queen of hearts, this very special person who was beautiful and photogenic and cultivated the press, when it suited her, and was fascinating for a number of reasons. I think the fact that she died young under those circumstances has projected her into some kind of special status. People who die young, like John F. Kennedy and James Dean, we’ll always think of them as the exceptional, young, charismatic people that they were when they left us.

How has Diana’s death affected the royal family today?

It was a terribly traumatic event. And the way that the royal family handled it, especially the queen, was very much criticized at the time. [The queen] didn’t really show, publicly anyway, the kind of grief and emotion and respect that people expected her to at the time, and I think she tried to make up for that, but it was an event that the royal family had a lot of trouble dealing with on many levels. It was certainly traumatic for the young princes, and for Prince Charles as well.

It was an unexpected and devastating human event that exploded in the middle of this family. They’re human beings, but they’re much more than that. They’re symbols, they’re monarchs, they represent the state. But on the human level, they were very much affected, and to some extent destabilized by it.

There are so many rumors and conspiracy theories still out there today. What do you think really happened that night?

Scott MacLeod and I examined every possible conspiracy theory that was written about or circulating on the internet or in any number of published books and articles. We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a conspiracy. I think you can very easily explain, if you look at the circumstances, that a drugged and drunk driver, driving too fast to escape the pursuing paparazzi, just lost control of the car in the tunnel.

It’s a traffic accident that took place under unusual circumstances—but, nonetheless, a traffic accident. You don’t have to look too far for an explanation when you look at the state the driver was in. In our book, we laid out many other scenarios, conspiracy scenarios, and analyzed them and pursued them as far as we could. Basically, at the end of the day, we didn’t really buy into any of them.

Has any new information come out since you first wrote the book?

A lot has happened, because the book came out very quickly, just a few months after the accident. At that point the French investigation was still going on. And then it was followed by a very thorough British inquest. Both the French and the English concluded that there was no conspiracy. As far as the paparazzi goes, they were a contributing factor in the accident—but they were not held criminally responsible. In legal terms, the person held responsible was the driver who, unfortunately, was killed instantly in the accident.

And then there were other things that came out in subsequent years. It appears from forensic evidence that there was a second car, presumed to be a Fiat Uno, considered by many to have collided with the Mercedes that was used to drive Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana. The French investigators looked at thousands and thousands of cars, and there was one Fiat Uno that appeared to have been in an accident, to have been repainted, that matched descriptions by certain eyewitnesses.

And there were a number of different findings concerning different paparazzi who were in the tunnel or who were considered to have been part of that pursuit who were never actually apprehended or investigated, and so there was some speculation that some of them could have been involved in a conspiracy.


Your new book, The Bettencourt Affair, is about a more recent French scandal involving the family behind L’Oréal. Can you explain it for people who are unfamiliar with the story?

This legal case was an absolute obsession in France for years. What really got people’s attention was the characters involved—Liliane Bettencourt, the world’s richest woman, and this much younger, gay, kind of flamboyant, charming, boyish artist, François-Marie Banier, who received hundreds of millions of dollars from her over the years in gifts.

Then Bettencourt’s daughter [Françoise] sued Banier for elder abuse. Françoise and her mother, Liliane, had a terrible relationship, and Francoise decided in 2007, after her father died, to launch this suit against Banier.

Banier was not a household name by any means, but he had written three best-selling novels by the time he was 25. He was somebody who had had very close relationships with some very famous and accomplished, wealthy people, ranging from Salvador Dali to Vladimir Horowitz, Johnny Depp, dozens and dozens of very influential people. One of the intriguing things about the book and about his story is, who is this guy? How did he manage to charm and manipulate and fascinate so many important people?

You interviewed Banier in person. What did you learn about him?

He’s self-interested, he’s very self-centered, he’s materialistic—there are sides of him that are not necessarily that admirable. But on the other hand, he is a fascinating conversationalist. He’s a workaholic, he goes out and does street photography every morning. In the afternoons, he works on his novels. He works 16, 18 hours a day.

The thing that struck me most was how aggrieved he was at this whole thing. His take on it is, look, Liliane Bettencourt was lonely, she was bored, she was depressed, and I came along and opened the doors to this exciting worl

d of art galleries and auctions and travel and theater, and I introduced her to some fascinating people and saved her life.

And she actually said this many times in writing, in letters to her lawyers. So Banier considers that his role was a very positive, almost altruistic role, and that it was normal that she gave him what she felt like giving him. If you total up what he got, it was just a tiny, tiny fraction of her fortune. She was in love with him, in a platonic way.

But Liliane and Banier are no longer in contact?

In 2010, her lawyers and her family almost sequestered her away from him. Every time he tried to call her house or contact her, he’d be told by domestic servants that she wasn’t available, and finally he realized that he wouldn’t be able to see her anymore.

And now Liliane’s daughter is under investigation for witness tampering.

It would be a horrible irony, really, if the person who launched this whole legal battle wound up the final victim. This is the final act of this very complicated legal battle. What Françoise did, basically, was give 700,000 euros to her star witness, former accountant of the Bettencourt family.

I think it’s very unlikely that she would be sent to jail, though that particular crime has a maximum three-year prison sentence and a 45,000-euro fine. The fine she could pay out of her pocket change, that’s no problem.

What do you want readers to take away from The Bettencourt Affair?

The book is really a saga; it’s not just a legal battle. It’s about three generations of this very wealthy family and what’s become of them today. The lesson I come back to is very simple: Money doesn’t buy happiness. It’s not a guarantee of happiness, of personal success, or even invulnerability to things like this suit.

DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA REVISITED: HOW WE GOT THE STORY

On August 31, 1997, just after midnight, a black Mercedes bearing Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed struck the 13th pillar of Paris's Alma tunnel, spun around, and crashed into a concrete wall. Within minutes, I was awakened by an urgent call from TIME's news desk in New York. As the magazine's Paris Bureau Chief, I was responsible for our coverage of this stunning event.
     My fellow correspondent Scott MacLeod, who lived just across the Seine from the crash site, was already standing outside the blocked off Alma tunnel, notebook in hand, interviewing eyewitnesses even as French medics worked desperately to save Diana's life and extract her from the crumpled wreck. (It was already too late for Dodi and driver Henri Paul: both had died instantly.)
     Meanwhile, I worked the phones and followed live TV coverage from my suburban home in Le Vesinet. Like millions of people around the world, I was shocked and saddened by the news bulletin that Diana had died on an emergency room operating table at 4:00 a.m. Working well past dawn, Scott and I filed our reports to New York, caught a few hours sleep, then headed into the TIME bureau just off the Champs-Elysées to plan our continuing coverage of the event and its aftermath.
     The Diana story was our unique focus for the next three weeks, as the magazine probed the background of the accident, the role of the pursuing paparazzi, and the conspiracy theories that began to circulate almost immediately after the accident. Along with our colleagues in the U.K., and a team of writers and editors in New York, Scott and I contributed to no fewer than three successive cover stories on Diana's death. Circumstances had put us at the epicenter of this event and the reporting we accumulated over those three weeks had made us some of the most knowledgable observers outside the French police investigators.
     It was at that point that, with the encouragement of super-agent Andrew Wylie, Scott and I proposed to do a book on what was then the hottest subject in the news business. To our amazement, Andrew sold it in 14 countries within a week or so. That was the good news. The bad news was that the publishers wanted the first half of the book by the end of November and the rest by December 15. Less than two months from our signing date. We both took leaves of absence from TIME and plunged into what remains the most daunting assignment of our careers. The result was DEATH OF A PRINCESS, which became a New York Times and international bestseller.
     This year, for the 20th anniversary of Diana's tragic end, my publisher, Dutton, asked us to prepare a revised and updated edition. Again there was only a short time available for this job, but journalists live by deadlines and this one was more manageable than the week-to-week rhythm we'd had to deal with on the magazine. There was relatively little to change in the main body of the book, but bringing the story up to date meant delving into the results of the French investigation, and the subsequent British inquest, and tracing the lives of the various protagonists—Prince Charles and his sons, Mohamed al-Fayed, the paparazzi, et al.—in the years since 1997. The result is now available on Amazon and iBooks. Anyone interested in this dramatic and historic story should click on those links now: we don't plan to do a 40th anniversary edition!

To buy the e-book edition of Death of a Princess, click on the links below:

Amazon 

iBooks