Marguerite Alibert: The Curious Life of Princess Fahmy
Updated: Aug 29
It's not often that a woman with a past as a Parisian courtesan finds herself rubbing shoulders with royalty, marrying into Egyptian aristocracy, and then standing in the dock at the Old Bailey accused of murder. But that's precisely the story of Marguerite Marie Alibert, later known by several names, including Maggie Meller, Marguerite Laurent, and most famously, Princess Fahmy. Her story is one of reinvention, survival and controversy, and for decades the most explosive part of it wasn't even known to the historian who wrote her biography.
Quick Answers
Who was Marguerite Alibert? A Parisian courtesan who married Egyptian aristocrat Ali Fahmy Bey, shot him dead at London's Savoy Hotel in 1923, and was acquitted at the Old Bailey.
Why was she connected to royalty? She'd had an affair with Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, between 1917 and 1918, and kept his letters for the rest of her life.
Why was she acquitted? Her defence painted her husband as an abusive, controlling foreigner, playing on the jury's prejudices. Her past and her royal connection were kept out of the trial entirely.
Was there a deal? A historian who later gained access to her family's private papers argued the acquittal was arranged to keep her royal letters out of the case and out of the press.
A Coachman's Daughter
Marguerite Alibert was born on 9 December 1890 in Paris to Firmin Alibert, a coachman, and Marie Aurand, a housekeeper. Her beginnings were modest. At fifteen she was sent to a convent boarding school, only to become pregnant there under circumstances that were never fully explained; the identity of the father was never established. Expelled and effectively cast out by her family, she gave birth to a daughter, Raymonde, at sixteen and, unable to support her, sent the baby to live with a family on a farm in the countryside while she tried to find work in Paris.
Her fortunes changed when she came under the wing of Mme Denant, a well-connected madam who ran a high-class brothel discreetly known as a maison de rendezvous. There, Alibert transformed from a vulnerable young woman into a polished and sought-after courtesan. It wasn't simply sex work; it was a calculated climb into a world of elite companionship, where charm and discretion mattered as much as beauty. Once she was financially secure, she brought seven-year-old Raymonde back to live with her and paid for a good education, determined to give her daughter a life she'd never had herself.
The Prince Who Wrote Too Much
In April 1917, at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, Alibert met Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne and the future Edward VIII. Edward was serving in France during the First World War, and by most accounts was still sexually and emotionally inexperienced when they met. He became infatuated almost immediately.
Their affair, which lasted until 1918, was intense while it burned. The prince wrote her a series of deeply personal letters, unusual for a royal to put in writing at all, and certainly compromising for a man in line to inherit an empire. The relationship eventually fizzled out. Alibert, however, kept every letter. It would take more than half a century, and a chance discovery by her own grandson, for anyone outside her immediate family to understand quite how significant that decision was.
Marriage to Ali Fahmy Bey
In the early 1920s, while in Egypt escorting a wealthy businessman, Marguerite caught the eye of Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey, a flamboyant and exceedingly wealthy Egyptian aristocrat. Fahmy pursued her ardently from their first meeting, and their relationship blossomed over extravagant trips to Deauville, Biarritz and Paris's finest establishments.
By December 1922, Marguerite had agreed to marry him. The couple had both a civil and an Islamic ceremony, the latter conducted in January 1923. From this point on, the press regularly referred to her as Princess Fahmy, an honorary title that wasn't formally accurate but captured the public's fascination with her transcontinental romance.
Murder at the Savoy
The marriage was tempestuous almost from the outset. Alibert would later claim she'd become frightened of her husband's volatile and controlling behaviour, describing a pattern of jealousy and abuse; Fahmy's family disputed that account entirely. The truth, as is so often the case, was probably more complicated than either side's version.
On 1 July 1923, the couple arrived in London and checked into the Savoy Hotel, travelling with a full entourage including a valet, a maid and Ali's private secretary, Said Enani, who would later become a key witness. Despite the luxury of their surroundings, their arguments continued, often in front of staff and other guests. On the evening of 9 July they attended a performance of The Merry Widow at Daly's Theatre; the outing itself passed without incident, but back at the hotel, over a late supper, the couple quarrelled again. Enani later testified that Ali had gone out alone that night in full evening dress, taking a cab towards Piccadilly despite a violent thunderstorm; when asked in court why, Enani said he didn't know.
At around 2:30am on 10 July 1923, the argument reached its conclusion. Moments earlier, the hotel's night porter had passed their door and heard a low whistle; he glanced back to see Ali Fahmy bent down, apparently calling Marguerite's small dog, which had wandered into the corridor. He'd walked only another three yards when he heard three shots fired in quick succession. Marguerite had shot her husband with a .32 calibre Browning pistol as he tried to walk away from her, hitting him in the neck, back and head. Staff were roused by the noise and a doctor was summoned, but Fahmy died within the hour at Charing Cross Hospital. When police arrived, Marguerite repeated two things, over and over: Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait, mon cher, what have I done, my dear, and J'ai perdu la tête, a phrase that was translated at various points as I lost my head or I was frightened out of my wits.
The gun itself became a point of dispute. The prosecution noted it had been kept close at hand, which they argued pointed towards premeditation. Marguerite's own account, given later at trial, was the opposite: that the pistol belonged to Ali, that he'd advanced on her with it after trying to strangle her, and that she'd wrestled it away from him before firing. Which version was true never became the deciding question in court; the defence's broader narrative about her husband's character did that work instead.
A Trial Built on Prejudice
The trial opened on 10 September 1923 and was an immediate sensation. Reporters jostled for space at the Old Bailey, and members of the public queued from before dawn. Marguerite's barrister, the celebrated Edward Marshall Hall, built his defence not on denying the killing but on reframing her as the victim, describing her husband as tyrannical, sexually deviant and, repeatedly, as a product of a culture fundamentally hostile to women. Fahmy, in this telling, became a stock caricature of what the era called Oriental cruelty, and the accusations, whatever truth they contained, landed with a jury steeped in colonial prejudice. In his closing speech, Marshall Hall urged the jury to send her back, in his words, "to the light of God's great Western sun." The judge's own summing-up leaned on the same framing, at one point telling the jury that Britain put its women on a pedestal in a way Egypt did not.
The prosecution tried to argue premeditation, pointing to the gun and the angle of the shots, but the racialised narrative built by the defence drowned out the physical case entirely. On 15 September 1923, after a trial lasting six days, the jury returned their verdict: not guilty. Marguerite Alibert walked free, to the horror of some and the approval of many who'd been swept up in the story of a refined European woman escaping a cruel foreign husband.
One detail was kept entirely out of the courtroom: the judge ruled that Marguerite's past as a courtesan, and her earlier relationship with the Prince of Wales, was inadmissible. That decision spared the royal family a genuine crisis. Had the letters she was holding ever surfaced in open court, they would have tied the woman in the dock directly to the heir to the throne.
How the Full Story Finally Came Out
For decades, the acquittal was put down to Marshall Hall's courtroom theatrics and the jury's prejudice, full stop. British judge and historian Andrew Rose told that version of the story in his 1991 book, Scandal at the Savoy, a detailed account of the murder and the trial that, remarkably, never once mentioned the Prince of Wales. Rose simply hadn't found the connection. Some years after publication, he received a letter from Marguerite's own grandson, informing him he'd missed an essential detail: his grandmother had, for eighteen months during the war, been one of the Prince's lovers. The grandson also handed Rose something no previous biographer had known existed, Marguerite's own 1934 memoir, written in her own words and never published.
Working from that memoir and further archival digging, Rose published a follow-up in 2013, The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder, arguing that the acquittal wasn't simply a triumph of courtroom rhetoric but something closer to an arrangement. Keeping Marguerite's letters from Edward out of the trial wasn't only about sparing royal embarrassment in the moment, Rose argued; it was reportedly part of an understanding that in return for her silence and the suppression of her past, she would walk free. Rose later summarised his conclusion bluntly, calling the proceedings essentially a show trial, since a murder conviction would have been catastrophic for the Crown.
Marguerite, for her part, never fully surrendered her leverage. She kept the letters, which included the Prince's indiscreet comments about his own father, King George V, and about the British war effort, as an insurance policy for the rest of her life.
Life After the Old Bailey
Acquittal in London didn't translate into a comfortable outcome in Egypt. Marguerite attempted to claim her late husband's estate, but an Egyptian court rejected the Old Bailey's verdict outright and dismissed her case. She returned to Paris with none of the fortune she'd hoped to inherit.
She spent the rest of her long life largely out of the public eye, living in a flat facing the Ritz Hotel in Paris and, according to some accounts, taking the occasional small part in French films. She reunited properly with her daughter Raymonde and eventually saw her grandchildren grow up. This is a similar arc to another European murder scandal that swallowed a family for decades; our piece on the Casati Stampa murders covers a case where the fallout, and the secrecy around it, stretched across an entire family line in much the same way.
Marguerite Alibert died on 2 January 1971 in Paris, aged 80. After her death, the letters she'd protected for nearly fifty years were found among her papers and destroyed, reportedly by a friend or family member who wanted the matter closed for good. It was only her grandson's decision, decades later, to hand her own memoir to a historian that let the fuller story finally surface.
A Case That Keeps Resurfacing
The story has never quite let go of the public imagination. It formed the basis of a 2023 episode of BBC Radio 4's Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley, and was examined again in Channel 4's A History of Royal Scandals, with historian Suzannah Lipscomb walking through how thoroughly the establishment shaped the outcome.
One historian reviewing Rose's book pointed out an odd historical footnote worth sitting with. Six years after the trial, an Egyptian boy named Mohamed was born in Alexandria; he would grow up to be Mohamed Al-Fayed, the businessman who eventually bought Harrods, the London department store once considered the height of British establishment taste. A century after Fahmy's death, the Savoy itself is owned by a prince of the Saudi royal family. It's a strange, roundabout kind of symmetry: the same city whose courtroom once built a case on painting a wealthy Egyptian man as fundamentally alien now finds much of its most prized real estate owned by the descendants of exactly the world it caricatured.
A Woman of Her Time
Marguerite Alibert was many things across her eighty years: a working-class Parisian, a mother, a courtesan, a royal mistress, a murder suspect and, briefly, a figure the press insisted on calling a princess. Her acquittal likely hinged on racial prejudice and the desperate need to protect a future king from scandal, but it also shows how powerful a courtroom narrative could be in shaping outcomes the physical evidence alone wouldn't have supported. For a look at how working women of this same period could end up on the wrong side of the law for far smaller offences, our piece on the Edwardian women forced to pose for mugshots makes for a telling contrast.
In a story that would prefer its histories neat and morally unambiguous, Marguerite Alibert resists easy categorisation. And that, perhaps, is exactly why it still holds attention a century on.
