The Princess and The Pedophile
Newly resurfaced 1995 letter raises questions regarding what Princess Diana knew about Jimmy Savile
On June 14th, 2023, a certified authentic letter from Princess Diana to Jimmy Savile was auctioned off on the website RR Auction. Before the recent auction, this letter written on October 10th, 1995, from the princess to the prolific sex predator had seemingly no online footprint and hadn’t been accessible to the public.
Diana wrote this letter on the same day that it hit the newspapers that she would be visiting Broadmoor hospital weeks later on November 14th 1995. This was seemingly deliberate timing, as the upcoming visit was the subject of her letter to Savile.
“I just wanted Sir J. to hear about it from me!”
Broadmoor is, of course, one of the hospitals where Savile infamously ran rampant with a position of power and a set of keys to all the wards – granting him unrestricted access to abuse countless victims.
In the relatively brief letter, Diana made two identifiable jokes. She opened the letter joking about the fact that they hadn’t talked in a while and so Savile might just be learning that she is not dead.
“I’m sorry to have been out of touch for so long but I know you have been busy and, I fear, you may just have noticed that I am still alive too!”
The second joke she makes is regarding her upcoming visit to Broadmoor (which is specifically a mental hospital) where she clarifies in jest that she isn’t being admitted as a patient.
“I am due to return to Broadmoor (temporarily!) on November 14th…”
Curiously, when she wrote to Jimmy Savile in October of 1995 and made these remarks that she was neither dead nor mentally unwell was the very same month she met with her lawyer Lord Mishcon with some troubling concerns. Mishcon transcribed these concerns in a note at this October 30th meeting, which was later included in “The Operation Paget inquiry report into the allegation of conspiracy to murder” conducted by the British Metropolitan Police.
“reliable sources (whom she did not wish to name) had informed her that by April 1996, whether in an accident in her car such as a pre-prepared brake failure or by other means, efforts would be made if not to get rid of her, then at least to see that she was so injured or damaged as to be declared unbalanced.”
Also included in the Paget Report is testimony from Simone Simmons and Hasnat Khan that Diana had told them each separately in 1995 that she had problems with her brakes and believed they had been tampered with.
“Simmons stated that one day in 1995 [Paget Note: She cannot be more specific after this length of time] the Princess of Wales telephoned her from her car saying that the brakes had failed and that she thought they had been tampered with. The Princess of Wales subsequently wrote a note to Simone Simmons stating that MI5 or MI6 were involved. Simone Simmons believed the note read something like: ‘Dear Simone, as you know, the brakes of my car have been tampered with. If something does happen to me it will be MI5 or MI6 who will have done it. Lots of love, Diana.’”
“In 1995 [Hasnat Khan] saw her driving a particular motor vehicle. When he next saw her in a car a couple of months later, which he described as around December 1995, she was in a different car, a BMW. Hasnat Khan asked her what had happened to the previous car, as it was such a lovely vehicle. The Princess of Wales told him the brakes had been tampered with, so she had decided to change the car.”
In the extensive archives on newspapers.com, the earliest mention of Diana being spotted driving the BMW was on October 30th, 1995 – the same day as her meeting with Lord Mishcon. In the same extensive archives on newspapers.com, the last mention of Diana being spotted driving her signature Audi was September 29th, 1995 - 11 days before her letter to Savile.
10 days before Diana was last documented driving her Audi (due to what she perceived as brake tampering) she met with Martin Bashir for the first time on September 19th, 1995. In the Dyson Report regarding Bashir’s unethical methods of obtaining the Panorama interview with Princess Diana, Lord Dyson states “I am satisfied that, by the time of the meeting, Princess Diana had paranoid fears about various things, including that she was being spied on and in danger of her life” and that “Mr. Bashir would have little difficulty in playing on her fears and paranoia.”
Lord Dyson believed she was already in a state of paranoia prior to September 19th - which was then exasperated by her meeting with Bashir and then exasperated even further by her Audi’s brake failure.
Diana also wrote a note to her butler Paul Burrell. Burrell initially thought this note was written in October of 1996, but the Paget Report deemed that October of 1995 was more likely which Burrell agreed was possible.
“This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous, my husband is planning an ‘accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.”
The Paget report concluded that October of 1995 was the probable time that she believed her brakes had been tampered with in order to kill her or cause serious brain injury, which notably aligns with her October 10th letter to Jimmy Savile where she expressed that he might have just noticed that she is still alive and that she doesn’t need to be admitted to Broadmoor mental hospital as a patient.
This letter to Jimmy Savile was written the same day that news broke of her upcoming November 14th visit to Broadmoor. Then November 14th arrived and another news story hit the headlines. Just thirty minutes after Diana arrived at the hospital, the bombshell news broke that she had sat down for the now famous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. A spokesman for the BBC confirmed that Diana directed the specific timing of this announcement.
"The Princess asked that we didn't inform anybody at all until she had spoken to the Palace, which she was only able to do this morning."
A BBC source stated that “the corporation was anxious to keep the interview a secret,” yet Diana insisted and got her wish.
As Princess Diana was conducting the opening ceremony for a new ward at the hospital, the BBC was explaining that “When she agreed to be interviewed she placed no constraints on the subject matter or the duration of the interview.” The interview was to cover "every stage of her life as the Princess of Wales, including her family, her separation and her future plans." The Queen was reportedly furious and Charles was reportedly left reeling with shock and anger.
The interview would go on to air on November 20th 1995. Of course, there was never any direct mention of Savile from the interview. Yet some of Diana’s most famous words from that interview were that “there were 3 of us in that marriage, so it was a bit crowded” which was always assumed to be a reference to Camilla. But the expression takes on new meaning when one considers that Jimmy Savile bizarrely acted as a marriage counselor between Charles and Diana. Royal correspondent Richard Kay has spoken on just how involved, intrusive, and inappropriate Savile was in Diana’s life.
“[Savile] inserted himself into their marriage in the way that he was someone who made himself available. And Charles liked having him around.
He would turn up, Diana told me, at Kensington Palace, where she lived, uninvited and would manage to persuade the police on the, on the gate, who never let anyone in without an invitation, to walk in.
She said he would sort of come and say, ‘Well, I'm just here just to check up on you,’” Kay continued.
“And she said that Charles used to sort of quip, that if there was a problem that needed sorting out, they'll get Jim to do it because 'Jim'll fix it'. I think she found it slightly unnerving.”
The royal correspondent noted Savile would “walk in and drift around Diana's apartment”.
He would also “kiss the hands of the secretaries” and “rub his lips” up their arms.
“This is something he even carried out on Princess Diana," added Kay.
“He licked Princess Diana's hand and she recoiled from that. As she told me, it was something very creepy."
Royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter echoed similar sentiments as Kay.
[Arbiter] admitted he didn’t like the “ghastly” man from the beginning and detailed some of his “unsavoury” behaviour.
"I did voice it at the time saying it's not really on and I did say that man is dreadful," he said.
"But he was pretty well established in government circles, with prime ministers of the day. And by being pretty well established, he was fairly untouchable."
If the letter from Diana to Savile is taken at face value, it is incredibly friendly and fawning considering that Diana and royal staff were reportedly so deeply unnerved and unsettled by Savile. Apart from her comments about being neither dead nor brain damaged, there are other elements of the letter that stand out.
She takes what could be perceived as a jab at Savile’s sick predilections.
"I particularly wanted you to know that I have continued my interest in mental illness"
She seems to mark her territory and emphasizes that she has a vested interest in this hospital that served as Savile’s hunting ground.
“I’m very keen to do more than just pass through as an occasional visitor,”
She also evokes the concept of “a media interest which is too often negative” and her hopes to “help foster public understanding of Broadmoor’s role.”
Alan Franey is the only other person Diana mentions in the letter. Franey was a key figure in the eventual report on Savile’s actions at Broadmoor.
Franey was installed at Broadmoor hospital upon Savile’s request, despite the fact that he was widely agreed upon as unqualified for the position.
[Cliff Graham] oversaw the appointment of general managers to run the special hospitals. In the case of Broadmoor, since the previous management team had been disbanded with the arrival of the task force, he made an interim appointment. At Savile’s suggestion, this was Alan Franey, relatively inexperienced for such a challenging post in a difficult environment, but an acquaintance and running partner of Savile’s. He was recruited, initially on a six-week secondment to the task force. Savile had already described Franey as ‘General Manager, designate’ in a letter to Graham five months before his substantive appointment. Savile’s influence in the appointment was inappropriate.
Savile knew him from Leeds General Infirmary (another hospital he preyed upon) and from running charity races. During this time period he had been described as Savile’s “public relations man”.
Throughout the Broadmoor report there are many troubling details about Franey.
We have an account from one ex-patient that in the mid-1990s he passed on to Franey complaints of sexual assault by Savile from three female patients, relating to a single day. He could not recall their names, and so we could not interview them. Neither Franey nor any of the Broadmoor staff involved with handling complaints in that period have any recollection of these complaints.
The former chief executive of the High Security Psychiatric Services Commissioning Board, Ray Rowden, reported to us that he had been told by the chief executive of the hospital, Alan Franey, that Savile had a ‘little secret’, a ‘liking for young girls, the younger the better’. This is strenuously denied by Franey.
Franey’s conduct in the hospital was, we were told, giving rise to concern. He occupied hospital accommodation during the week, returning home on a Friday afternoon. Stories began to circulate widely in the hospital, as we heard from many interviewees, that during the week female members of staff visited his house after hours, often for prolonged periods. We were told, for example, that Franey had ‘quite a life with some of our staff’, and that he ‘put it about a bit’ and was using his accommodation for ‘inappropriate activities’
In our view, it is impossible to examine Savile’s position in the hospital and his ability to exploit it without understanding Franey’s role in the management of the hospital.
This Broadmoor report also made note of Diana’s involvement at the hospital, and confirmed that she had opportunities for private meetings with patients.
HRH Diana, Princess of Wales visited the hospital on several occasions. Although some staff believed that Savile was in some way behind these visits, there is little evidence to suggest this, though it would be typical of Savile to claim a link. Two were official visits, and several were less-formal visits, arranged at shorter notice, when the princess would spend time talking to patients, sometimes in private conversations, but always with appropriate security in place.
The first of these two official visits was in 1991 and the second was, of course, in November of 1995 when her tell-all interview was announced. One of the several unofficial visits occurred a year earlier in November 1994. Diana reportedly pleaded with officials to be let in, and spent an hour at Burnley ward, an intensive care ward for highly disturbed female patients. Burnley ward would go on to be mentioned multiple times in the Broadmoor report as a ward where Savile would prey on numerous women.
In the Burnley ward, Savile put his hand on one victims leg and then, while still talking, proceeded to move it upwards and grope her genitalia. Savile did not use restraint. She told a member of staff, who said she must have imagined it. Savile would assault her in the same way on several occasions over a period of weeks, before moving on to some other patient. His approach to the other patients he assaulted – who, she said, tended to be the younger and more vulnerable women – was the same. She also described assaults on her and other patients, both physical and sexual, by male staff. All these events caused significant distress to her and to others, and she attributes two patient suicides – one in Broadmoor and one later – in part to the effects of these events on vulnerable individuals. This was a clear, reasonably detailed and convincing account.
One staff member who made a routine visit to Burnley Ward in 1990 or 1991 glanced into the day room. He was taken aback to see Savile sitting on a bench between two female patients. The room was otherwise unoccupied, but one staff member was standing outside the day room doorway, as if keeping watch. Both patients, Savile and the staff member jumped guiltily, as if surprised, and Savile challenged our interviewee, asking him what he was doing there.
Through the synthesis of this newly accessible letter from Diana to Savile and all of these previously accessible details gathered from the Paget Report, the Broadmoor Report, and extensive newspaper archives, there are some reasonable and grounded areas of interest to raise questions.
Did Diana suspect that Savile was involved in the brake failure she experienced in October of 1995? It would be enormously coincidental for Diana’s two jokes in the letter to just happen to be about being alive and mentally fit when that very month she said she was told she would be deliberately killed or incapacitated in a car wreck. Savile had a reputation as a fixer. As noted earlier, Charles would reportedly quip “that if there was a problem that needed sorting out, they'll get Jim to do it because 'Jim'll fix it.'" And according to Savile, this reputation apparently preceded and motivated the “Jim’ll Fix It” series in the first place.
Savile: “I was working on [Top of the Pops] and they were desperate for me to do a series. One of the BBC men says, ‘Listen, Jimmy, you’ve been fixing it for people all your life, why don’t we do a programme where we fix it for people on film?’ “
According to the Broadmoor report, senior civil servant Cliff Graham valued Savile as a problem solver and Alan Franey referred to him as “The Godfather”.
Graham would talk over issues with Savile – not just to do with hospitals – and Savile would ‘cut to the chase’ and simplify problems.
Franey rang Savile regularly when he was at Stoke Mandeville, asking for ‘The Godfather’. Savile would ‘hold court’ in his accommodation for staff who wanted to talk to him about work and their personal problems, and it seems very likely to us that all of this played straight into Savile’s hands as an extremely effective manipulator of people.
Savile would also refer to himself as this nickname in a 1983 interview with The Sun.
The people who work for me call me The Godfather. And nobody messes with The Godfather. He is the boss. The big man. I know how to take care of myself and I know how to take care of anyone who gets a bit cocky, a bit above himself. Some of the hairy things I’ve done would get me ten years inside. I never get physical personally. Let’s just say that while I’m in Edinburgh, very dodgy things happen in London. I’m quite innocent - I’m out of the way.
Did Diana see herself as a complex problem that Jim’ll simply fix? To say nothing of her death two years later in 1997, to say nothing of whether her 1995 brake failure was actually due to tampering, if she merely suspected that Savile was responsible for what she suspected was tampering would be an immensely fascinating detail on its own.
When confiding in her friend Simone Simmons, Diana identified MI5 and MI6 as the culprits that would tamper with her brakes. So this raises another question:
Did Diana suspect that Savile was in some way associated with British Intelligence? Savile was catapulted to national stardom as a presenter on the BBC productions “Top of the Pops” and “Jim’ll Fix It” in an era when MI5 played a direct role in vetting BBC employees. The BBC and British police were ignoring allegations and protecting Savile for decades. As noted earlier, Richard Kay reported that Savile was able to stroll past police into Kensington Palace with no invitation - a privilege granted to no one else.
Charles reportedly sent [Savile] a box of cigars and a pair of gold cufflinks on his 80th birthday with a note that read: "Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you for that."
Did Diana know that Savile was abusing patients at Broadmoor (and other) hospital(s)? If it is granted that the two jabs Diana makes in the letter are antagonistic, then it requires the rest of the friendly cordial letter to be re-evaluated with that context. She emphasizes that she has a vested interest in the hospital and isn’t just a passer-by. She evokes the concept of negative media attention and talks about “fostering public understanding” regarding Broadmoor.
The timing of her actions along with the stories she knows are hitting the headlines implies premeditated calculation.
She famously was very media-savvy. She had to be, based on the overwhelming role that the press played in her life. She knew that she could use the press to send a clear message without uttering a single word.
The memorable image of Diana sitting alone in front of the Taj Mahal, the tomb built by a Mogul emperor for his wife, was the most vivid example of how she got her message out through photographs. On a visit many years earlier, Charles had vowed to bring his future wife to the romantic monument. Palace officials planning the schedule for the Indian trip in February 1992 had no knowledge of the Prince's pledge and didn't give a second thought to Diana's solo visit. It was only the day before, when they saw the pack's excitement, that they realized the photographers wanted a picture to fit the story they planned. Diana understood, too, and obligingly posed. Her message, wrote Dimbleby: "The marriage was indeed on the rocks."
Diana might have known of Savile’s crimes and she might have been flexing this knowledge, but she wasn’t ringing the alarm bells in any public fashion. But this was decades before the #MeToo movement, she was already regularly painted as mentally unbalanced, and Jimmy Savile had attained an untouchable god-like status in the British zeitgeist.
Was an under-the-public-radar flex of knowledge to “confuse the enemy” as she stated in the interview? During the interview she likened her relationship to the palace as “a poker game, a chess game,” Did she want to utilize this compromising information as an arrow in her quiver? To divulge this information would (hopefully) put an end to Savile’s reign of terror, but she would no longer have that information to leverage. It also ran the risk of damaging/destroying the Royal institution itself, and she made it clear in the interview that she had no intention of that.
“People say to me that, you know, `Diana's out to destroy the monarchy', which has bewildered me, because why would I want to destroy something that is my children's future?”
If Diana did indeed know about Savile’s sick predilections, then it would be a lot less convincing for the rest of the Royal Family to claim they had no idea, which is what they have always maintained since the Savile revelations.
If Diana knew about what Savile was doing at Broadmoor, she had motivation to keep that knowledge out of the public eye to protect the institution that she admitted would define her own children’s future. But that’s not to say that she condoned Savile’s actions. She could’ve wanted to put an end to the abuse in a way that avoided public scrutiny. In her letter to Savile she emphasizes her vested interest in the hospital which would imply that she at least wants to take a stand against the abuse in a more private fashion. If she knew about Savile, would she not voice her qualms privately with Charles and the Queen as a first resort before ever going nuclear and leaking this information to the public?
What’s next? I will be continuing to push for more information to further flesh out this story. There are more threads I plan to pull and hopefully this story as it exists now is enough to catalyze more details to come out. There are apparently dozens of letters between Savile and members of the Royal Family that haven’t been released for public consumption. They were referenced in the recent Netflix documentary on Savile, but they haven’t all been made available. The October 10th 1995 letter from Diana to Savile only has a footprint online due to its recent auction in June 2023. I will be contacting the auctioning site and extending my contact info to the buyer and seller in the hopes that they are willing to reach out and discuss. I have contacted many relevant sources to see what else there is to uncover. Please subscribe so you don’t miss any future developments, and follow me over to my YouTube channel where I discuss this story further, elaborate on a few more details that lend themselves better to a video/audio format, and divulge some more of my thoughts and speculation.
Contact me at JamieCrawfordNewsMedia@gmail.com for inquiries, story tips, or correspondence.