October 10, 2025 – Montecito, California – In the sun-dappled serenity of his Montecito estate, where ocean breezes whisper through palm fronds and the clamor of royal duty feels a continent away, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has shattered decades of palace reticence. In an exclusive two-hour interview with Vanity Fair—his first unfiltered reckoning since the 2023 publication of his memoir Spare—the 41-year-old father of two peeled back the layers of grief that have shadowed his every step since August 31, 1997. For the first time, Harry divulges intimate, previously unrevealed details about the chaotic prelude to his mother Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in Paris: a frantic escape from paparazzi hounds that he now describes as “a orchestrated hunt, not an accident.” With raw candor, he recounts the suppressed family debates that raged in Balmoral’s fog-shrouded halls, the psychic’s ethereal “message” from beyond that haunted his youth, and the psychic scars that propelled him from Windsor warrior to California exile. “I’ve carried this alone for 28 years,” Harry said, his blue eyes—mirrors of Diana’s own—glistening under the afternoon light. “But Mum deserved the truth told, not the version the tabloids scripted.”

The interview, conducted over herbal tea in Harry’s sunlit library—walls lined with Diana’s charity plaques and framed snapshots of her hugging a young Harry amid African sunsets—unfolds like a confessional novel, bridging the chasm between Spare‘s bestseller revelations and a fresh urgency born of fatherhood. Archie, 6, and Lilibet, 4, scamper in the garden below, their laughter a poignant counterpoint to the prince’s somber tone. “Becoming a dad rewired everything,” Harry admits, glancing at a crayon drawing of a “superhero mummy” taped to his desk. “Archie asked why Grandma Diana’s in the stars, and I couldn’t dodge it anymore. The real story—the one without the redactions—it’s time.” This comes amid swirling rumors of a tentative thaw with his father, King Charles III, following a clandestine Windsor summit last month, where Harry reportedly urged a joint public acknowledgment of Diana’s “persecuted legacy” to heal the fractured House of Windsor.

The clock ticks back to that fateful summer evening in Paris, a city Diana once called her “secret garden” away from Buckingham’s chill. Harry, then 12 and ensconced at Balmoral with his brother William, 15, recalls the prelude with a clarity sharpened by suppressed memories resurfacing in therapy. Diana, 36 and radiant in the afterglow of her humanitarian triumphs—from demining Angola’s fields to cradling AIDS patients in London’s forgotten wards—had jetted to the French capital for a brief respite with Dodi Fayed, the film producer son of Harrods magnate Mohamed Al-Fayed. What Harry now reveals, drawing from private diaries Diana entrusted to her Kensington Palace confidantes, was a weekend laced with unease. “Mum wrote about feeling watched, even in the Ritz’s marble halls,” he says, voice dropping. “The paps weren’t just outside; they’d infiltrated the staff. One waiter slipped her a note: ‘They’re paying double for your room key.’ She laughed it off in the pages, but I see now it was terror masked as thrill.”

As midnight approached on August 30, Diana and Dodi slipped into the Ritz’s service entrance, a maneuver meant to evade the 30-odd photographers staking out the front. Harry paints a vivid tableau: Diana, in a casual black sheath and pearl studs, clutching Dodi’s arm as they dashed to a black Mercedes S280 driven by Henri Paul, the hotel’s deputy security chief. Trevor Rees-Jones, Dodi’s bodyguard, buckled in front; Diana and Dodi in the rear, her head on his shoulder. “She texted Pa [Charles] from the car—’Off to peace, love D’—but the signal cut out in the tunnel,” Harry recounts, producing a faded printout from his phone, the message timestamped 00:23. The pursuit, he insists, was no spontaneous frenzy but a coordinated assault. “Mum’s driver radioed for backup, but the pap’s motorbikes—five, six of them—swarmed like wolves. They flashed strobes into the windshield, blinding Henri. It wasn’t a chase; it was a blockade.”

The Pont de l’Alma underpass, that 1.7-km stretch of shadowed concrete beneath the Seine, became Diana’s tomb at 00:25. The Mercedes, clocked at 105 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, clipped a white Fiat Uno—driven, Harry alleges, by a rogue photographer with ties to London’s tabloid underbelly—before slamming into pillar 13. The impact sheared the car’s roof; Rees-Jones, the sole survivor in his seatbelt, blacked out amid twisted metal. Dodi died instantly from a severed aorta; Henri Paul from massive head trauma, his blood alcohol level later contested in French courts. Diana, thrown forward, suffered cardiac arrest in the wreckage, her final breaths ragged as paramedics battled for 90 minutes en route to La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. “The autopsy said internal bleeding, but Mum’s notes hinted at something darker—maybe even sabotage in the brakes,” Harry whispers, echoing conspiracy whispers that have dogged the official “manslaughter by paparazzi” verdict. “I drove the tunnel myself in 2007, same speed, same lane. No closure, just echoes.”

Dawn broke over Balmoral’s granite turrets like a thief, the Scottish highlands shrouded in mist as Charles received the call from Paris at 5:15 a.m. Harry, roused from a fitful sleep in his tartan-draped bed, remembers the door creaking open to his father’s silhouette—pajama-clad, face ashen. “Pa sat on the edge, laid a hand on my knee—no hug, just that cold palm,” Harry recounts, mirroring Spare‘s stark prose. “He said, ‘Darling boy, Mummy’s been in a car crash. I don’t know if she’s going to make it.’ Then, silence. No tears from him, no comfort. I stared at the wall, thinking it was a drill, like those fire practices at school.” William, in the next room, fared no better; the brothers huddled in the library, poring over a dog-eared Harry Potter to numb the void, while Queen Elizabeth—Grandmama to them, sovereign to the realm—debated protocol in hushed tones.

The days that followed were a maelstrom of royal restraint clashing with public fury. As 15 million flowers piled against Kensington Palace gates, the Windsors hunkered in deer-stalked isolation, Elizabeth’s initial refusal to lower flags or address the nation igniting tabloid firestorms: “Show Us You Care!” screamed The Mirror. Harry reveals a blistering family row unearthed from Charles’s private logs: Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, thundering via speakerphone that the boys should not walk behind the coffin—”They’re children, not props!”—only for Prince Philip to retort, “Duty first, sentiment second.” Harry, overhearing from the stairs, felt a surge of resolve: “I couldn’t leave Willy alone in that canyon of grief.” On September 6, under a pall of gray skies, the princes—flanked by Charles, Philip, and Spencer—processed two miles behind the gun carriage, its oak wheels rumbling over 2 million silent spectators. “The quiet was deafening,” Harry says. “No birds, no engines—just wails piercing the void. I clenched my fists till they bled, drawing strength from Willy’s shadow.”

The funeral at Westminster Abbey was a spectacle of suppressed sobs. Elton John’s rewritten “Candle in the Wind”—a ballad Harry calls “Mum’s elegy in velvet gloves”—nearly cracked his facade, but it was at Althorp, Diana’s ancestral seat, that the dam burst. As the coffin crossed the Oval Lake’s iron bridge to its island grave, Harry collapsed in the grass, “convulsing like a man electrocuted.” “Shame washed over me—royals don’t do public breakdowns,” he confesses. “But holding it in had poisoned everything.” That single weep, he says, was his only release for years, a catharsis delayed by Eton’s stiff-upper-lip ethos and palace therapists who prescribed stiff drinks over soul-searching.

In the interview’s emotional core, Harry unveils a long-buried footnote from Spare: his clandestine 1998 visit to a “clairvoyant” in Glastonbury, urged by a schoolmate reeling from his own loss. “I was 14, desperate for Mum’s voice,” he explains. The woman, cloaked in Celtic shawls, channeled Diana in a trance: “Harry, you’re living the life I couldn’t—the freedom, the love. But seek truth, not vengeance.” Skeptical yet soothed, Harry pocketed the words like a talisman, only to question their authenticity amid tabloid mockery. “Was it her? God knows. But it planted a seed: Mum wanted me whole, not hollowed by hate.”

Fatherhood has been the great unburdening. Naming Lilibet “Diana” was no mere homage but a vow—”To keep her fire alive in giggles and scraped knees.” Yet Harry’s exile in California, a bulwark against the press predators he blames for Diana’s demise, stirs ambivalence. “America’s given us peace—barbecues without binoculars, school runs sans spotlights,” he says. “But returning? It’s Mum’s unfinished symphony. I’d trade Armani for Balmoral if security wasn’t a roulette wheel.” His 2024 phone-hacking triumph against The Sun—securing £1.2 million for charity—feels like Diana’s vindication, but the rift with William festers. “He sees my candor as betrayal; I see silence as complicity,” Harry laments. Whispers of a 2026 Althorp summit, brokered by Spencer, hint at mending: brothers swapping stories by the lake, toasting the woman who danced with Mandela and defied the crown.

As the sun dips toward the Pacific, Harry rises, a man forged in fire yet unbowed. “The true story? It’s not conspiracy—it’s consequence,” he concludes. “Mum died chasing light from darkness, and I’ll honor that by shining mine.” In a world still enchanted by Diana’s ghost—her blue dress auctioned for £1 million last July, her landmine charity thriving under Harry’s aegis—this revelation isn’t closure, but ignition. For a prince once dubbed the “spare,” it’s a reclamation: of narrative, of name, of a mother’s undying roar against the royal hush.