From private photos to 'Squidgygate': Princess Diana's biggest media scandals throughout the years

Princess Diana helped to change public perception of people suffering from HIV and AIDS in 1987 when she insisted on shaking the hand of a patient in the HIV/AIDS unit at London Middlesex Hospital in front of a sea of reporters.

The royal shook the man's hand without gloves on, showing the world that he was just like any other person and deserved to be treated with dignity. "HIV does not make people dangerous to know," she said. 

"You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it. What's more, you can share their homes, their workplaces, and their playgrounds and toys."

While the media flew into a frenzy over the historic moment, Diana stood firm in her decision, as her son, Prince Harry, shared in a speech decades later.

"She knew that AIDS was one of the things that many wanted to ignore and seemed like a hopeless challenge. She knew that the misunderstanding of this relatively new disease was creating a dangerous situation when mixed with homophobia," he said in 2017.

"So when that April she took the hand of a 32-year-old man with HIV, in front of the cameras, she knew exactly what she was doing. She was using her position as Princess of Wales, the most famous woman in the world, to challenge everyone to educate themselves, to find their compassion, and to reach out to those who need help instead of pushing them away."

Squidgygate was perhaps one of Diana's biggest scandals, sparking a media storm over a leaked phone call between herself and James Gilbey, her childhood friend and possible lover.

On New Year's Eve in 1989, Diana called James from Sandringham, where she was spending the holidays with her royal in-laws. During the call, the pair made several kissing noises, and, what's more, James called the princess "darling" 53 times and "Squidgy" 14 times.

The call was intercepted and recorded by two separate radio hobbyists, and the story broke in the National Enquirer three years later before The Sun published the transcripts and audio.  

The phone call was on full display for the public to hear, and people could even call a special phone line to listen to it in full. 

Diana denied that she had an affair with James, as did he, but the scandal was overshadowed five months later by the release of the Tampongate tapes, in which Charles and Camila shared an intimate phone conversation.

Diana's revenge dress was a sight to behold, and was brought out in the wake of Charles' explosive 1994 TV interview, in which he admitted to his affair with Camilla. 

Although Diana and Charles had been separated for two years by that point, the princess was determined to retaliate by wearing a daring black off-the-shoulder Christina Stambolian gown to a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens that same night.

While some media outlets saw the move as immature and calculated, others saw it as genius, as it overshadowed Charles' interview and put her on the front page of every paper the next morning.

Diana's explosive tell-all interview with BBC's Panorama in 1995 blew the door wide open into her marriage to Charles and his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles. The duo hadn't officially divorced yet, but Diana seemed determined to share the truth about her life with journalist Martin Bashir.

In the interview, she covered everything from details about Charles and Camilla's affair (which birthed the famous line: "Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded"), her struggles with mental health, postpartum depression and bulimia, her affair with James Hewitt, and her true feelings about the royal family.

The interview immediately blew up, with 23 million people watching in the UK alone and around 200 million tuned in worldwide. Diana's tell-all was likely a catalyst in Queen Elizabeth's decision to advise the couple to officially divorce a month later.

It came out years down the line that Martin Bashir had used deceitful tactics to get the sit-down interview with Diana, even going so far as to forge bank statements to win her trust. As such, the BBC pledged to never broadcast or license the footage again after this news came out, out of respect.

When a paparazzo snapped a picture of the princess sunbathing topless in Spain in 1996, the photos quickly leaked and caused a major scandal, leading to an awkward conversation between Diana and Condé Nast executive Nicholas Coleridge.

According to his book The Glossy Years, Diana had lunch with Nicholas shortly after the photos were leaked. "She said, 'Nicholas, can I ask you something? Please be truthful. Did you see the photograph of me in the Daily Mirror? The topless one?'" he wrote.

"[She added] 'William rang me from Eton. Poor boy, he's only 14. He was upset. He said some of the other boys were teasing him.'"

Diana's romance with Dodi Fayed, the playboy son of Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed, garnered massive media attention when their relationship went public in August 1997, after The Sunday Mirror published photos of the pair sharing a kiss.

The media appeared to dislike Dodi, as he was seen as a philandering playboy with an overly ambitious father who wanted entry into British high society. The fact that Diana and Dodi had originally met back in 1986 at one of Charles' polo matches also fanned the flames of scandal. 

Sadly, Dodi passed away in the same car crash that took Diana's life on August 31, 1997, in Paris, when the couple were trying to escape the encroaching paparazzi.