The Crown’s fifth season finds the War of the Waleses being fought on a new battleground: in the press. The latest season chronicles the mounting media battle between Princess Diana and Prince Charles that preceded their 1996 divorce. First, Diana secretly collaborated with Andrew Morton on the explosive tell-all, Her True Story—detailing her marital unhappiness, struggle with bulimia, and suicide attempts. In response, Charles returned public fire by conducting a sit-down interview with the BBC’s Jonathan Dimbleby, confirming his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and explaining his side of the marital story. And in the sixth episode, “No Woman’s Land"—which finds Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) more paranoid, vulnerable, and vengeful than ever following Charles’s on-camera confessional—an ominous real-life figure makes his grand entrance: Martin Bashir, as played by Prasanna Puwanarajah.

Series creator Peter Morgan had plenty of captivating historical material to draw from for the period drama’s new season, which spans the royal scandal-rich period of 1991 to 1997. But the Bashir story line—which stretches into the following episode, “Gunpowder”—feasts on the journalist’s real-life manipulation of Diana, some details of which were only unearthed last year when Lord John Dyson, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, released a damning 127-page report on the deceitful tactics used to score the 1995 Panorama interview, during which Diana famously commented, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” alluding to Camilla and Charles’s long-standing affair. Diana also confirmed her own marital infidelity in the interview.

To secure the sensational sit-down, as shown on The Crown, Bashir first wooed Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer. As the Dyson report notes, during an initial meeting, the then largely-unknown journalist presented Spencer with phony bank statements purportedly showing that several of his and Diana’s employees had accepted payments from a newspaper publisher, presumably to spy on and report about their royal bosses. Spencer, as explained in the Dyson report, said that he trusted Bashir because of his BBC association and because of what appeared to be authentic bank statements, which he called the “absolute clincher.” The documents had twin effects according to Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles: “Bashir simultaneously established his trustworthiness and credibility with the Spencers and [later] strengthened Diana’s resolve to keep everything she was doing secret from people who might try to dissuade her.”

The statements, it was later revealed, were actually mocked up by a freelance graphic designer at Bashir’s request. “I mean, I was duped,” Spencer is quoted as saying in the Dyson Report.

According to the Dyson report, it was because of Bashir’s successful deception that Spencer made the introduction to his sister, Diana. Once in contact with Diana, Bashir reportedly doubled down on his manipulation efforts—stoking Diana’s paranoia with further false reports about insiders’ betrayals. As reported by The Telegraph, Bashir even claimed that Prince William and Harry’s nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had an affair with Prince Charles by showing Diana a fake receipt for what he said was the nanny’s abortion. (Earlier this year, the BBC publicly apologized to Legge-Bourke for the “serious and prolonged harm” that the false allegations caused her, and agreed to pay her an undisclosed settlement.) “Bashir also told Diana that she shouldn’t trust [her friends] Catherine Soames, Kate Menzies, and Julia Samuel,” wrote royal biographer and former Vanity Fair contributor Sally Bedell Smith in the biography Diana in Search of Herself. “He probably figured that all three women were independent-minded as well as discreet, and would have cautioned Diana against cooperating with him.”

From the Archive: Diana and the Press

As is depicted on The Crown and included in the Dyson report, Spencer began to doubt Bashir’s credibility after comparing contemporaneous notes from his first and second meetings with the journalist, and finding small discrepancies. “I then immediately apologized to Diana for having wasted her time,” Spencer is quoted as saying in the report, “and explained that I believed Bashir to be a fantasist or a fraud and told her why. I didn’t know if he was a liar or a fantasist, but I knew he was bad news, in my opinion, and that was the end of him for me.”

But Diana did not listen. As Smith wrote in Diana in Search of Herself, “Bashir had struck a nerve with Diana, who had long suspected she was being spied on by the royal family.”

In a phone call with Smith, the royal biographer confirms that Diana did not tell close friends or family members about the interview. But, unlike in The Crown episode “Gunpowder,” she did run the idea of the BBC sit-down past her psychic (who approved of the idea) and other friends including Sir Richard Attenborough, film producer David Puttnam, and literary critic Clive James, the last three of whom attempted to talk the princess out of the PR opportunity, convinced it would be a complete disaster. Per The Diana Chronicles, “James warned her that she ran the risk of Prince Charles and the Palace ‘going nuclear’ and continuing until there was nothing left.”

Bedell Smith tells VF that Diana “had been casting about, talking to various people about whether she should do an interview. Clive James said, ‘Don’t go near it. You will be hounded for the rest of your life.’ Which was very prophetic. David Puttnam said, ‘Don’t even think about it. Stay quiet.’ She had advice from very good people not to do it…but she already had a tendency toward paranoia and Martin Bashir fueled that paranoia. I think he bears a lot of responsibility for everything that happened after that.”

Sinisterly, the interview was scheduled for Guy Fawkes Day, the British holiday commemorating the failed 1605 attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament and the King of England. The filming of the Panorama interview in The Crown is depicted almost exactly as Brown described it in The Diana Chronicles, down to the princess answering her Kensington Palace door herself and applying her own makeup.

It was taped on a Sunday in Diana’s sitting room at Kensington Palace when all the staff had gone home. Security guards had been told to expect the delivery of a new hi-fi system “in boxes.” Once the cameras, microphones, and other equipment had been smuggled in, Bashir and his two-man crew could walk straight up.”

Such schemes to avoid detection by Charles’s camp and Buckingham Palace were mirrored by skulduggery at the BBC, where the executives of Panorama and their superiors, right up to the office of the Director General, made sure that the BBC Board of Governors knew nothing was afoot. An awkward fact was that the board’s chairman was the one-legged war hero Marmaduke Hussey, Baron Hussey of North Bradley. Strictly speaking, Director General John Birt had a duty to tell his chairman about a program that was certain to be not only controversial but also positively offensive to the Sovereign. But Hussey was married to none other than Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen’s Woman of the Bedchamber and closest confidante. If “Dukie,” as the formidable chairman was known, got so much as a whisper of what Diana and Bashir had planned, Birt feared, the broadcast might never see the light of day or be discredited in advance by the Palace.

Duke Hussey was made aware of what Diana and the BBC had done only after the interview, already safely in the can, had been viewed by the Panorama producers in a secret screening room set up at a hotel in the seaside town of Eastbourne and approved by the BBC’s head of news, head of current affairs, and its editorial policy advisor. Birt notified Hussey at the same moment Diana formally notified the Queen.

Diana vengefully chose Charles’s 47th birthday to inform a Buckingham Palace representative of the interview, which eventually ran on the queen and Prince Philip’s 48th anniversary. Among her bombshell allegations:

• Charles resented her popularity and star power: “If you’re a man, like my husband a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks. And you feel low about it, instead of feeling happy and sharing it.”
• Charles was not equipped to be king, in her opinion: “There was always conflict on that subject with him when we discussed it and I understood that conflict, because it’s a very demanding role, being Prince of Wales…being king would be a little bit more suffocating. And because I know the character I would think the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that.”
• Charles’s affair with Camilla was long-term and responsible for the breakdown of their marriage: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
• She “adored” her former horse-riding instructor James Hewitt, and confirmed their affair.
• She made herself throw up up to five times a day because of her bulimia and accused an unnamed party of considering her “unstable” because of it.

Almost 23 million people watched the Diana interview, which made Bashir a star reporter. Incredibly, the one Panorama producer who alerted the network about Bashir’s forged bank statements, Mark Killick, was fired within 24 hours of raising the subject.

In a statement this year, Killick accused the BBC of “try[ing] to destroy my reputation rather than investigate my concerns.” He added that the network’s actions “show just how desperate the BBC was to hide what had happened. It was an extraordinary attempt to cover up wrongdoing and the climate of fear it created may well have stopped other BBC whistleblowers from speaking out for a generation. I still find it staggering that the BBC was so determined to conceal the truth that it launched a smear campaign against me to protect its tainted scoop.”

It was only once Lord Dyson’s investigation was being concluded last year, some 25 years after the bombshell interview, that Bashir stepped down from the network, citing issues with his health. The Dyson report was published days later, concluding that Bashir deceived Charles Spencer to secure the interview with Diana. The report also faulted BBC management for covering up Bashir’s unethical conduct.

“Without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark,” Dyson said in the report, which was requested by the broadcaster’s new management. Dyson concluded that BBC’s former management was “woefully ineffective,” and accepted Bashir’s account during a previous investigation that pronounced Bashir to be an “honest and honorable man,” without ever questioning Spencer.

Bashir responded to the report with his own statement.

“I apologized then, and I do so again now, over the fact that I asked for bank statements to be mocked up. It was a stupid thing to do and was an action I deeply regret,” said the disgraced journalist, before claiming that “the bank statements had no bearing whatsoever on the personal choice by Princess Diana to take part in the interview.”

In the aftermath of the Dyson report, BBC’s current director-general Tim Davie said, “The BBC should have made greater effort to get to the bottom of what happened at the time and been more transparent about what it knew. While the BBC cannot turn back the clock after a quarter of a century, we can make a full and unconditional apology…Now we know about the shocking way that the interview was obtained, I have decided that the BBC will never show the program again; nor will we license it in whole or part to other broadcasters.”

In addition to apologizing and paying an undisclosed settlement to Legge-Bourke, the BBC similarly apologized to and agreed to pay “a substantial sum” in damages to Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson, whom Bashir used forged documents to accuse of selling Diana’s secrets, and to Killick, acknowledging that the fired BBC producer acted “entirely properly.”

Both Princes William and Harry also offered their own scathing reactions to the report.

From the Archive: Diana’s Last Dance

“The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life,” said Harry in a statement. “Our mother lost her life because of this, and nothing has changed. By protecting her legacy, we protect everyone, and uphold the dignity with which she lived her life.”

William excoriated the BBC in a separate statement.

“It is my view that the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said. The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse and has since hurt countless others. It is my firm view that this Panorama program holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again. It effectively established a false narrative which, for over a quarter of a century, has been commercialized by the BBC and others.”

“It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia, and isolation that I remember from those final years with her,” William added. “But what saddens me most, is that if the BBC had properly investigated the complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known that she had been deceived. She was failed not just by a rogue reporter, but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking the tough questions.”