Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, says for “many years” he believed that his mother, Princess Diana, had faked her own death.
“For a long time, I just refused to accept that she was gone,” the 38-year-old member of the British royal family said in a Sunday interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.”
Diana died in a 1997 Paris car crash when Harry was 12 and his brother, Prince William, was 15.
Harry told Cooper he believed that his mother “would never do this to us” and that “maybe this is all part of a plan.”
Diana would reappear at some point, Harry said his teenage and young adult self thought, and then “she would call us and that we would go and join her.”
Promoting his memoir, “Spare,” Harry said in a Monday interview on “Good Morning America” that he was engaging in “magical thinking” in dealing with the grief from his mother’s death.
Harry said he “had huge amounts of hope” his mother would eventually reemerge.
“I say 100 percent it’s a defense mechanism, right? I think for anyone, especially if you’re a kid — you know, I was 12 years old,” Harry told ABC’s Michael Strahan. “I refused to accept that that was what had happened.”
It wasn’t until more than a decade later, when Harry was 23, that he said he accepted that his mother was gone after visiting Paris and requesting to be driven in a vehicle at the same speed through the tunnel where his mother died.
A 2006 investigation by London’s Metropolitan Police found that Diana’s driver was intoxicated and trying to evade paparazzi photographers before the crash.
Harry said during the “60 Minutes” interview that he still doesn’t feel as if he has all the answers he needs about the fatal crash.
“Truth be known, no. I don’t think I do. And I don’t think my brother does either. I don’t think the world does,” Harry said.
“Do I need any more than I already know?” he wondered aloud. “No. I don’t think it would change much.”