A former bodyguard has claimed that Michael Jackson spoke constantly about two women, and that if he could have married either of them, he would have. One was Beyoncé. The other was Princess Diana. The claim is striking, and it comes with a caveat worth stating up front. But underneath it sits something far more interesting, because the Diana part of this story is not gossip at all. Michael Jackson and Princess Diana were genuinely friends, as documented in his own words.
The recent claims come from Matt Fiddes, a British martial arts instructor who worked around Jackson from the late 1990s. Speaking on the podcast The Art of Dialogue in May 2026, Fiddes said Jackson “loved Beyoncé” and wanted to marry her, adding: “Beyoncé or Princess Diana. He told me he would marry Princess Diana in a heartbeat.” He also described the two of them spending hours on the phone.
When Diana Met Michael Jackson (1988)
Take Fiddes with some caution. He has given a long string of increasingly sensational interviews to British tabloids over the years, and he has offered no independent evidence for any of this. But here is the thing. On Diana, he is broadly describing something real.
The two met on 16 July 1988, backstage at Wembley Stadium, before a Bad tour show that Diana attended with Prince Charles in front of a sold-out crowd of 72,000. Jackson was nervous. He knew she was coming, and he had made a decision beforehand. He removed “Dirty Diana” from the setlist, worried that a song about a rock groupie might offend a princess who happened to share the name. Then he met her, and it went completely differently from how he expected.
“Michael Jackson Wanted To Marry Beyoncé” — Ex-Bodyguard Says He Also Wanted To Marry Princess Diana
Jackson told the story himself to Barbara Walters in 1997, and it is charming. Diana asked him straight out whether he was going to perform “Dirty Diana.” He replied: “No, I took it out of the show because of you.” Her answer was immediate. “No! I want you to do it. Do it. Do the song.” It was her favorite track of his. Reports from the night say she danced through the concert while Charles stayed seated, and Jackson gave the couple two miniature tour jackets for William and Harry.
That was the only time they ever met in person. The friendship carried on over the telephone for years afterward, across continents, and Jackson referred to it openly for the rest of his life. Speaking to German media in 1999, he described the relationship. “We were very close.” When Diana died in 1997, he was devastated and spoke about it emotionally in public.
The Beyoncé side is thinner but not baseless. Fiddes describes Jackson turning up unannounced at a party in Las Vegas after hearing she was there, only to be told she had left five minutes earlier, at which point he said “Ahh. Matt, let’s go” and went home. What is verifiable is that the two knew each other. Recently unearthed footage from 2001 shows a young Beyoncé, still in Destiny’s Child, being told in a studio session that Michael Jackson was “an incredible fan” of her work, and reacting with pure nerves. “Don’t tell me that.”
Whatever the truth of the marriage claims, the underlying pattern is sad. Here was the most famous entertainer alive, forming his closest connections with two women he could mostly only reach by phone, or from across a room.