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01st Sep 2021

Ian Bailey doubles down on strange claim that Princess Diana flirted with him

Clara Kelly

“She seemed playful and would flutter her peepers at me.”

Ian Bailey has doubled down on strange claims that Princess Diana flirted with him, saying that she would “flutter her peepers” at him when he would cover events she was at.

Writing in The Big Issue magazine on Wednesday, Bailey said that as a journalist he would cover events where members of the UK Royal Family would be in attendance, adding that he believed Princess Diana had a “habit of flirting”.

“Because I was on the official Royal rota, I covered events as an approved correspondent at which the Royals attended,” he said.

“The thing I remember about Diana was that she seemed to have a habit of flirting, using her sapphire blue eyes to great effect.

“I was almost always the tallest member of the press pack and our eyes would meet. She seemed playful and would flutter her peepers at me.”

Bailey also said that he had also ended up in a “heated outdoor swimming pool” during a “memorable night” at a charity fundraising event at Badminton House which was attended by Prince Charles and Spike Milligan.

While he didn’t say who he reportedly ended up in the pool with he did say that the host “even kindly found me a bedroom”.

It’s not the first time he’s made the claims as Bailey previously told The Sun that Diana “always had an eye” for him and “was quite flirty”.

Bailey has maintained his innocence in regard to the murder of French filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier after first hitting headlines as a suspect in the case.

The brutal murder, which took place in the town of Schull in west Cork in 1996, triggered one of the biggest murder investigations Ireland had ever seen and became a national obsession.

Over the past quarter of a century, facts and information about the death of Sophie Toscan du Plantier are still being released to the public, with most people in Ireland able to give a broad strokes retelling of the murder.

In 2019, a French Court found Bailey guilty of voluntary homicide, sentencing him to 25 years in prison.

Ireland didn’t extradite Bailey due to a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that the Irish extraterritorial provision was not the equivalent of the French legislation and therefore they were not reciprocal.

Bailey was not present for the French trial after winning the legal battle against his extradition.

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