Princess Di’s Romp A Hoax

A videotape of Princess Diana’s semi-nude romp with her lover which titillated tabloid readers and TV viewers all day Tuesday turned out Tuesday night to be a fake.

The Sun, the tabloid that had obtained the tape, reported it with great fanfare and distributed it to television, later admitted that it had been the victim of “one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the decade.”

The supposedly secretly recorded videotape of Diana cavorting with lover James Hewitt five years ago was excerpted in still photos by the Sun in the morning and also made its television debut Tuesday.

It showed, as it happened, a Diana look-alike or perhaps a composite Diana (it isn’t clear how the hoax was perpetrated) doing a little striptease down to what was being described politely as her “sports” underwear. It purportedly showed former cavalry officer Hewitt getting down on the floor and pretending to be a horse, with Diana taking a little ride.