The episode led to a slander lawsuit that ended in a financial settlement from a major company.

Princess Diana

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Some royal secrets go to the grave…and some royal secrets are revealed thanks to The Crown on Netflix. Princess Diana’s former chauffeur, Stephen Davies, worked for her from 1989 to 1995 and was formally let go in May of 1996. He never knew why Diana fired him—that is, until he watched an episode of The Crown.

Davies was able to understand the reason why he was let go after watching an episode of The Crown that detailed the drama behind the late princess’s bombshell interview with Martin Bashir on BBC Panorama. “It happened overnight,” Davies recalled in an interview with The Daily Mail. “From driving her everywhere I was banned from the wheel of her car. After the Christmas break [in 1995] I was told she didn’t want me near it, I wasn’t even allowed to wash or hoover it.”

Until being fired the following year, Davies explained “all I could do was sit in the garage for ten hours a day, my official shift, doing nothing, and then go home. I was heartbroken, humiliated. She shunned me.” As for the moment when the driver received the news of his termination, “someone ushered me into her drawing room at Kensington Palace. She said, ‘Bye Steve, thanks for everything,’ shook my hand and walked out. She left me standing alone, without having said a word in return.” Then-Prince Charles was kinder and “said he’d done everything he could to fit me into his own rota of drivers but it just wasn’t possible.”

Princess Diana

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In the infamous interview, Bashir used deceitful tactics to earn Diana’s trust, and spread false information about Davies in the process, claiming that the driver was leaking details about her personal life. “People I have been talking to at MI6, contacts I have had for years as an investigative journalist, confirmed to me that your driver Steve Davies is also in on it,” Bashir (portrayed by actor Prasanna Puwanarajah) said in the episode.

“It was excruciating to watch but solved the mystery for me,” Davies recalled. The driver would later sue BBC for slander, and he reached a settlement with the broadcasting company in May. “The BBC accepts that the allegation was likely to have caused HRH the Princess of Wales to doubt the claimant’s loyalty and professionalism and may well have contributed to the claimant’s redundancy six months later,” the lawsuit concluded.

Princess Diana

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Davies now feel like he was robbed of having a career because of a lie. “The consequence for me was that I was forced out of a job I wanted to be my life’s work,” he told the outlet. “Royal service is about being trusted and loyal, showing discretion, having a sense of duty. Your reputation, your good name is everything. I would have taken a bullet for her, died for her. My job was my life, I was always there for her. You couldn’t explain Diana then, just as you can’t explain her now.”

Diana’s story ultimately ended as a result of her car crash in Paris the year after Davies’s firing in 1996, and he thinks if he was driving her at the time, she would still be alive: “She died believing I had betrayed her and that’s something I can’t ever forget or forgive.”