Sunday August 31, 2022 will mark the 25th anniversary of Lady Diana’s death. The opportunity to learn more about his bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, the only survivor of the fatal accident, who changed careers.
An infamous date… On August 31, 1997, Lady Diana lost his life in a terrible road accident under the Alma bridge in Paris. At only 36, she left behind her two sons, Princes William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12. If all eyes were on the young woman, her lover, Dodi Al-Fayed and her driver, Henri Paul, also died in this terrible accident. Only his bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones survived the accident. Plunged into an artificial coma for ten days, he had suffered severe facial trauma and suffered from significant memory loss. After quitting his job, Trevor Rees-Jones told his story in the book The Bodyguard’s Story, published in March 2000. After working in the United Nations peacekeeping department, he worked for the American oil company Halliburton for six years. Today, Trevor Rees-Jones is chief security officer at AstraZeneca.
Following serious injuries, Trevor Rees-Jones had to have his face reconstructed. For the Sun, a source said: “His life is calm and uneventful now. He certainly does not seek publicity and does not talk about it much. He tried to move on and move on with his life.“After the accident, Lady Diana’s bodyguard said he had virtually no memory of what had happened and the last thing he remembered was getting into a Mercedes. In an interview with theIrish Times in 2000, he assured: “I just consider it a preventable accident. That Henri Paul made a mistake driving the car when he knew he had been drinking. Without telling us or Dodi that he was not fit to drive. It was the mistake. I accepted the statement. It was a simple drunk driving accident caused by speeding. And it was like that.” Since then, Trevor Rees-Jones has lived in Shropshire with his wife, Ann Scott, a teacher at Belvidere School in Shrewsbury.
The revelations of the lawyer of Trevor Rees-Jones
On June 5, 1998, almost a year after the tragedy, it was in a press release that the lawyer for Lady Diana’s bodyguard confided: “He recovered 80% of his physical form, but did not regain his memory. He still does not remember anything that happened between the Ritz and the Alma tunnel, and it will be very difficult, if he speaks about it one day, to know if these are real memories or things he has read or seen on television.“Assuring that Trevor Rees-Jones would quickly give his version of the facts, he added:”In my opinion, Justice Stephan is doing an extraordinary job. No detail escapes him and it is necessarily long. But we have complete confidence and Trevor eagerly awaits the findings of the investigation. He had been invited, not as a witness, but as a civil party to this confrontation.“
In an interview given to DailyMail Sunday August 14, 2022, Lee Sansum, ex-bodyguard of Lady Diana, assured that this accident could easily have been avoided. “It could have been me in that car. We drew straws to see who would accompany Trevor Rees-Jones this weekend. When I learned that they weren’t wearing seat belts in the accident, I understood why they hadn’t survived. I always insisted on it“, he had indicated. Friday, August 19, 2022, in the program Good Morning Britain on ITV, David Douglas, the police officer who reported the findings of the inquest said: “When you look at most accidents, you find a chain of events and you see that if any of those events had been different, it might not have led to what happened. For example, if the victims had worn their seatbelts, our experts tell us that there was probably an 80% chance that they survived the accident.“
The heartbreaking words of the firefighter and doctor who tried to save Lady Diana
Sunday, August 21, 2022, for The MirrorXavier Gourmelon, the firefighter who first arrived on the scene following Lady Diana’s accident, said: “I massaged her heart and a few seconds later she started breathing again. To be honest, I thought she would live. It was a real relief because obviously as a rescuer you want to save lives and I thought I did. As far as I know when she was in the ambulance she was alive and I expected her to be alive. But I learned later that she had died in the hospital. It was very disturbing.Shocked, he added:I know now that there were serious internal injuries, but the whole episode is still very vivid in my mind. And the memory of that night will stay with me forever.“
In June 2021, the doctor who had tried to save Lady Diana’s life spoke in the columns of the DailyMail. Monsef Dahman, 33, worked at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. He remembered:The thought that you have lost someone important, whom you care about personally, scars you for life.“Being on call when Prince Charles’ wife arrived at the hospital at around 2 a.m., he was called immediately.”If I remember correctly, it was a fairly calm day. I was resting in the duty room when I received a call from Bruno Riou, the chief duty anesthesiologist, who told me to go to the emergency room. I was not told it was Lady Diana, but that there had been a serious accident involving a young woman“, he had declared before slipping: “We fought hard, we tried a lot, really a lot. Frankly, when you work in these conditions, you don’t notice the time passing.“