Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was the sole survivor of the deadly car accident that claimed the lives of Princess Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul in 1997.

Following a romantic dinner at the Ritz Paris on the evening of Aug. 30, 1997, Rees-Jones accompanied Diana and Dodi as they traveled from the hotel to Dodi’s apartment. But the couple — and their bodyguard — would never reach their destination, as their vehicle crashed head-on into a concrete column while attempting to evade paparazzi.

The high-speed collision killed Dodi and the driver, Paul, on impact, and left Princess Diana and Rees-Jones with catastrophic injuries. Diana was later declared dead in the early morning hours of Aug. 31, leaving Rees-Jones as the only survivor of the horrific car crash.

Despite the global outpouring of grief following Diana’s death, Rees-Jones has managed to rebuild his life out of the public eye. From the injuries he sustained to his continued career in security, here is everything to know about Trevor Rees-Jones and his life today.

Who is Trevor Rees-Jones?

Born in 1968, Rees-Jones originally hails from Oswestry, England, a town on the border of Wales about 155 miles northwest of London, according to The Independent. After receiving a degree in sport and biological science, he joined the British Army Special Forces as part of the 1st Battalion in the Parachute Regiment. He served at least one tour of duty in Northern Ireland, earning a General Service Medal.

Following his stint in the military, Rees-Jones began working as a bodyguard for the Fayed family, whose patriarch, Mohamed Al-Fayed, was an Egyptian billionaire who once owned Harrods department store and the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Paris. Rees-Jones joined the family’s private security detail in the mid-’90s, though few in his life reportedly knew what he was doing for work.

In 1995, Rees-Jones (born Trevor Rees) married Sue Jones and hyphenated his last name with hers. Sue, who met Rees-Jones at Fitzalan High School in Wales, worked as a buyer for Harrods before opening her own gift shop.

Was Trevor Rees-Jones Princess Diana’s bodyguard?

Rees-Jones was employed by the Fayed family, not Princess Diana. After separating from then-Prince Charles, Diana turned down official police protection.

As a result, when Diana struck up a romance with Dodi Fayed, Mohamed’s son, the couple relied on the Fayed family’s personal security officers for protection. “Because Diana had been tricked into distrusting every kind of official protection,” Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson told PEOPLE in 2025, “she put herself in a position where she had to accept the protection of people who were not competent.”

Dodi’s private security team included Rees-Jones, who first met Diana in July 1997 when she vacationed on the Fayed family yacht, the Jonikal, with William and Harry, per CBS News.

“I was assigned to protect Dodi, and obviously, if the princess was with Dodi, then she came under our security umbrella,” Rees-Jones said on Larry King Live in March 200.

Further complicating their protection was a lack of communication from Dodi, who often failed to provide vital information to his security detail.

“Dodi was a pain in the neck,” Rees-Jones told Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes in 2000. “He didn’t want to tell anybody where he was going ahead of time, so it was difficult for a bodyguard to set up security.”

Such was the case on the evening of Aug. 30, 1997. Diana and Dodi, along with Rees-Jones and a second bodyguard, Kez Wingfield, had just arrived in Paris via private jet after a 10-day vacation in the Mediterranean aboard the Jonikal. The couple had planned to have dinner at the Paris restaurant Chez Benoit, but changed their plans after learning that paparazzi were camped out at the restaurant.

“We’d been informed that the couple were going out for the evening. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been informed of the venue,” Rees-Jones recalled on Larry King Live. “And this was a problem that had happened all the way through that last 10-day trip, that myself and the other bodyguard weren’t given enough information to do a good job as we saw fit.”

He continued, “There was a lack of information coming from Dodi. And that night was a case and point: that we didn’t know the venue.”

How did Trevor Rees-Jones end up in the car with Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed?

On the evening of Aug. 30, Diana and Dodi ultimately opted to have dinner at the Ritz Paris’ L’Espadon restaurant. While they dined, a crowd of paparazzi and onlookers gathered at the front of the Ritz. Rees-Jones and Wingfield devised a plan to push back the crowd to allow Diana and Dodi to make their exit and travel back to his apartment via a two-car caravan.

However, Paul later informed the bodyguards that the “plan’s been changed.” Paul said, “We’ll be leaving from the back, with just one car. … The other two cars will leave from the front, to divert the paparazzi. He doesn’t want a bodyguard,” Rees-Jones recalled to PEOPLE in 2000.

Rees-Jones, however, insisted they needed security.

As a result, at approximately 12:17 a.m. on Aug. 31, a Mercedes driven by Paul left the rear of the Ritz with Princess Diana and Dodi in the backseat and Rees-Jones in the front passenger seat. But Paul and Dodi’s ruse to avoid the paparazzi was foiled almost immediately.

“As the vehicle pulls away, I noticed that there was a small, light-colored hatchback vehicle, and a couple of motorbikes or scooters with photographers on them [that] followed us,” Rees-Jones told Larry King.

What happened to Trevor Rees-Jones?

Approximately 15 minutes into the drive from the Ritz to Dodi’s Paris apartment, tragedy struck: After turning into the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in an attempt to evade the tailing photographers, the car driven by Paul and carrying Diana, Dodi and Rees-Jones crashed head-on into a concrete support column.

“There was this huge, violent, terrifying crash followed by the lone sound of a car horn,” Jerome Laumonier, who was near the crash site, later told PEOPLE.

Dodi and Paul were killed instantly, while Princess Diana and Rees-Jones were gravely injured. Diana suffered devastating chest, lung and head injuries — and despite doctors’ best efforts to save her, she died around 4 a.m. at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.

Rees-Jones, meanwhile, sustained severe head and chest injuries in the crash. In fact, the bodyguard hit his head so hard on the dashboard that his “face was completely smashed,” Luc Chikhani, the surgeon who treated him, told the BBC.

“I have never seen so many fractures on a man who was still alive,” he added.

It took an 11-hour operation, where surgeons referenced photographs from his wedding, to fully reconstruct Rees-Jones’ face. More than 30 metal screws and plates were used to rebuild his features, which had been almost completely flattened in the crash, according to Chikhani. Rees-Jones remained sedated and in the hospital for several weeks following the deadly accident, but walked away as its sole survivor.

What conspiracy theories involving Trevor Rees-Jones developed after the fatal crash?

Following the deadly car crash, Dodi’s father Mohamed became convinced that his son and Princess Diana’s deaths were not the result of a tragic accident. Instead, he believed that Prince Philip had ordered British MI6 agents to assassinate Princess Diana and his son to prevent them from marrying, the Associated Press reported.

As part of this theory, Mohamed (who died in 2023) accused Rees-Jones of faking his memory loss following the crash as part of the government cover-up, according to Reuters. The Egyptian billionaire also claimed that Rees-Jones had been given a senior security job at the United Nations in exchange for “his continued silence,” Sky News reported.

Rees-Jones denied all of Mohamed’s accusations, even writing a tell-all memoir, The Bodyguard’s Story, in 2000 to defend himself and tell his side of the story. In 2004, Operation Paget — the official inquest into the conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana’s death — cleared Rees-Jones of any wrongdoing and declared that the crash was a “tragic accident.”

“I’m not bitter at Mr. Al Fayed,” Rees-Jones told PEOPLE in 2000. “Personally, I think he’s made himself look stupid with these attacks and the extraordinary claims he’s made. But I’d be ashamed if I didn’t feel some sort of moral responsibility — you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. It’s not so-called survivor’s guilt — it’s the fact that I was paid to look after Dodi and his guest, and they died on my shift. I’ve got this hanging over me for the rest of my life.”

Where is Trevor Rees-Jones today?

Rees-Jones has continued to work in security since surviving the deadly car accident that claimed the lives of Princess Diana, Dodi and Paul.

Initially, he went back to work for the Fayed family after taking six months to recover from his injuries. But by April 1998, Rees-Jones resigned from his security post with the Fayeds on the advice of his lawyers. He later revealed, per CBC, that Mohamed had grown “frustrated” with him over his lack of memory from the night of the crash and over his refusal to publicly endorse Mohamed’s theories about the crash in interviews.

Since then, Rees-Jones has held security roles at the United Nations, Halliburton and AstraZeneca, according to the Daily Mail. In his personal life, Rees-Jones dropped the Jones from his surname following his divorce from his first wife, Sue, in 1998. He remarried a schoolteacher named Ann Scott in February 2003, and reportedly resides in England with his wife and children.