Hollywood Life editor-in-chief Bonnie Fuller has written an emotionally effusive girly article about Lady Diana Spencer for CNN.com. I’m not challenging Fuller’s personal observations, but I don’t see how anyone can write about Diana without at least touching on the basic fact that she’s dead, and not from sheer happenstance. A tree didn’t fall on her.

The former Princess of Wales essentially orchestrated her demise due to her atrocious judgment in choosing a profligate immature asshole — Dodi Fayed — as a boyfriend. Fayed was just foolish and insecure enough, jet-setting around with his father’s millions and looking to play the protective stud by saving Diana from the paparazzi, to put her in harm’s way.

It came to a head in Paris on the night of 8.31.97. Fayed told his drunken chauffeur to try and outrun a bunch of easily finessable scuzzball photographers on motorcycles, and we all know the rest.

I was working at People when Diana started seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to search around, make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man. Very bad boyfriend material, in short…and yet Diana overlooked this or didn’t want to know. And that’s why she’s dead.

How do you write even briefly about this woman without at least mentioning the tragic turn?