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Royal Rift Exposed As Bombshell Reason Behind Princess Diana And Sarah Ferguson’s Falling Out Finally Revealed
The late Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson were not just sisters-in-law married into the British royal family but childhood friends, introduced by their mothers, who attended the same school.
The wives of then-Prince Charles and Prince Andrew reportedly grew very close in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their bond strengthening through shared, troublesome experiences within the confines of the monarchy.
Highlights
- Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson’s friendship reportedly fractured after Ferguson’s 1996 autobiography, which included a controversial claim about the former.
- A royal author claimed that, although Ferguson acted as if they had made up, the relationship was never actually mended.
- Sarah Ferguson got candid about missing Princess Diana following her tragic demise in a 2021 interview.
However, Ferguson’s 1996 autobiography, My Story, is believed to have caused a rift because it included a controversial claim about Diana.
The detail was recently revisited by royal author Andrew Lownie, who said it all began with Ferguson accusing Diana of giving her a viral infection.
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Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson’s relationship fractured after the latter’s autobiography
Image credits: Getty/Georges De Keerle
Lownie’s publishing credits include books like The Rise and Fall of the House of York and Traitor King.
He spoke to the Daily Mail on Thursday, May 28, about what went wrong between Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson.
Image credits: Getty/James Andanson
The author claimed that the pair fell out over Ferguson claiming in her autobiography that she caught “a verruca from borrowing some shoes from Lady Diana.”
Verruca is the medical term for a wart that develops on the sole of one’s foot and is highly contagious.
Image credits: Getty/Princess Diana Archive
Per Lownie, although Ferguson claimed her relationship with Princess Diana was later repaired, that was far from the truth.
He cited Princess Diana’s anger over Ferguson “selling stories” about her as the reason for their “never repaired” bond.
Before their falling out, Ferguson was someone Princess Diana often turned to, voicing her frustrations about life in the royal fold.
“Diana would come to Sarah Ferguson every Sunday, and they would moan about the royal family,” Lownie claimed.
Andrew Lownie also accused Princess Diana of pulling a “tough trick” on Sarah Ferguson
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According to Lownie, Princess Diana promised Sarah Ferguson they would both divorce their husbands at the same time.
However, she “let Sarah Ferguson do it on her own and basically learned from how the royal family treated her about how she would handle the divorce herself.”
Image credits: Kpmansa
Image credits: Getty/Georges De Keerle
Ferguson and Andrew divorced in 1992 after a decade of marriage, but remained close in the years that followed.
The pair even continued to live together at Royal Lodge, the home he was evicted from when King Charles stripped his brother of royal titles, including Prince, in October 2025, in the wake of renewed scrutiny around his ties to the deceased child predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Image credits: tigerred59
How Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson went from childhood friends to falling out: @andrewlownie reveals the inside story of their fractured bond. pic.twitter.com/0Umsg0PhVt
— Daily Mail Voices (@DailyMailVoices) May 28, 2026
Princess Diana and Charles, meanwhile, married in 1981 and separated in 1992, but were not divorced until 1996.
Diana passed away in a car accident the following year at age 36.
Sarah Ferguson made attempts to fix her relationship with Diana before her demise, but was unsuccessful
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In her 2011 memoir Finding Sarah, Ferguson said that her friendship with Princess Diana was never strained to the point that either woman viewed the other as an adversary.
She, however, revealed that Diana had not spoken to her for a year before her demise.
“I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something stuck in her head, it stuck there for a while,” Ferguson wrote.
Image credits: Getty/Tim Graham
“I wrote letters thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out,” she continued, but that did not yield results.
Ferguson claimed Diana sought her out only a day before her demise via a friend.
“The day before she d**d, she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.’”
Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, offered a different explanation than Lownie for her fallout with Sarah Ferguson
Princess Diana stopped her friendship with Sarah Ferguson over the fact she would leak and sell information about her to the press. She also caught her being two faced. I have been saying this for years, and derangers were attacking me, believing that laughable excuses Sarah was… https://t.co/sRSJxK1xplpic.twitter.com/jS690guqGr
— Nina (@ShakeLS) May 28, 2026
Paul Burrell’s 2025 book The Royal Insider claimed the friendship between Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson soured not because of the wart accusation, but because the former did not want the latter to include any mentions of her in her book.
Princess Diana also wanted Sarah Ferguson to refrain from mentioning Prince William and Prince Harry, but she did not meet the request.
“It was too much to ask. When the book was published, Diana was furious that throughout its pages there were references to her, William, and Harry,” Burrell said.
Image credits: Getty/Tim Graham
“Diana felt used and refused to speak to Sarah.”
Sarah Ferguson got candid about missing Princess Diana in a 2021 interview with Hello! magazine, saying she thinks about her “most days.”
“She was the only other person who knew and was around at that time in the ’80s when we all wore those very strange clothes,” Ferguson joked. “We had such fun.”
“These two together seemed so fun,” a netizen said in agreement
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