Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a rotation at the King’s palace, in Jeddah, when he got an urgent summons. Princess Hala, a daughter of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had gone wild with a knife. Burdick was asked to enter her quarters and forcibly sedate her.
Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King’s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him—forced sedation was a “violation of my professional ethics,” he said—but he was curious. Though he admired Abdullah, who styled himself a champion of women’s rights, he knew little about the lives of the ruler’s daughters.
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Burdick drove to a walled compound on the palace grounds. Soldiers unlocked imposing gates to reveal a large villa set in landscaped gardens, facing the Red Sea, and Burdick instructed the guards to stay back as he entered the house. Italian pop music was blaring from a second-floor landing, and he followed the sound. “At the top of the stair, I could see a young female with a large kitchen knife in hand,” he wrote, in a detailed account of the incident.
The princess was slender, dressed in a loose T-shirt and joggers, and her dark curls were cut short. When Burdick approached, he recalled, “she responded with a demand that I not touch her. She said she was the daughter of the King and I was nobody.” He promised not to come closer, but asked for permission to rest a moment.
Hala gestured at a sofa and Burdick sat. As she stood over him, he spoke softly. “I explained to her that I didn’t intend to provide her with medication that I thought was inappropriate, that I was there to listen,” he said. Eventually, she perched on the far end of the sofa, still gripping the knife, and began to talk.
Hala said that she and three of her sisters—Sahar, Maha, and Jawaher—were being held captive in the villa. They had been there since their mother, one of the King’s wives, absconded to London to escape his control years earlier. Burdick offered to try to find a way to help, and the princess agreed to return the knife to the kitchen. “I did my method of sedating a patient, which is to talk with them,” he said.
Back at the royal clinic, Burdick reviewed the princesses’ charts and was dismayed to learn that they were being regularly dosed with a combination of Valium, Ativan, Xanax, and Ambien. “They’re chemically immobilizing them,” he recalled thinking. He learned that he would now be required to write the medical orders for these drugs. “I felt between a rock and a hard place,” he wrote. If he refused, he reasoned, he would likely be replaced by someone more pliable, and, even if he could stop the drugs, an abrupt withdrawal after years of chronic use would have dire consequences. “With the intention of buying time to learn more about the difficult situation these young ladies faced, I set aside my ethics,” he wrote.
For more than seven years, Burdick was part of a team of trusted physicians charged with medicating the princesses with prescription tranquillizers. The sisters also seemed to have unfettered access to cocaine, amphetamines, and alcohol, Burdick said, further jeopardizing their health. At the same time, he grew to be a close confidant of Princess Hala, and worked to secure her and her sisters’ release.
The princesses’ imprisonment became public in 2014, when two of them briefly established contact with journalists. Their mother, living in exile in London, begged the United Nations to intervene, alleging that her daughters were being forcibly drugged. “These are terrible violations of the most basic human rights,” she wrote. Her pleas drew no help. Last year, I reported that, after King Abdullah died, in 2015, the princesses abruptly lost all contact with the scholars and journalists who had championed their cause. (The Saudi government has declined to respond to repeated inquiries about the princesses’ fate.)
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince who became Saudi Arabia’s de-facto ruler after the death of Abdullah, has touted women as a key part of his plan, called Vision 2030, to modernize the country; he has created employment opportunities for women and appointed female ministers and ambassadors. These gestures have been welcomed by Western governments, though many experts discount them as a fig leaf. Women in Saudi Arabia continue to live under a strict system of male guardianship, and people who advocate for gender equality are routinely jailed. In March, Saudi Arabia was selected to chair the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, despite condemnation of the country’s “abysmal” record by human-rights groups.
Burdick told me that Salman’s administration continued to crack down hard on the sisters, who were deprived of food and water and whose contact with the outside world was cut off. His account—the first time a palace insider has spoken about the situation—corroborates the claims made by the princesses, and by their mother in her filings to the U.N. In memos to senior palace medics, Burdick had warned of “a disastrous outcome with severe permanent impairment or even untimely death.” Yet his concerns were dismissed. “I was told over and over that they’ll never be released,” he said.
I spoke with four former palace medics who further corroborated significant aspects of Burdick’s account. One former colleague of Burdick’s, a doctor who worked for the royal family for several years, told me that he referred to the King’s four imprisoned daughters as “the Rapunzels.” He confirmed that Hala and Maha were kept on a regimen of heavy sedatives. “I felt sorry for them, but obviously there were political issues here that were way outside my pay grade,” he told me.
Burdick, who is now eighty-three, left his post not long after Abdullah died. He told me that he has struggled ever since to fathom what he witnessed. “Here’s this man that I just have immense respect for, who I think was really a force for good in the international world, and I think he was particularly a force for good for women’s rights in the Middle East,” he said. “How do you square that with locking his four daughters up and subjecting them to fifteen years of torture?”
Burdick decided to speak out after learning that Hala had died in 2021, in her mid-forties, after years of malnutrition complicated by substance abuse. Her sister Maha died six months later, according to several authoritative sources. Though Burdick knew the risks involved in criticizing the Saudi regime—“note the fate of Jamal Kashoggi,” he wrote me in an e-mail—he insisted that he was unafraid. “I’m old, and I’m going to die one of these days, and I want to die with some satisfaction that I’ve done my best,” he said.
In 1995, Burdick was working as an emergency doctor in McAllen, Texas, when he noticed an unusual job advertisement in a medical journal. The opening was for a position teaching young Saudi doctors at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh, where the royal family were treated. Burdick was in his mid-fifties and burned out from decades of city hospital work—“lots of drugs, lots of alcohol, lots of violence,” he said. He found the prospect of a radical change enticing.
Burdick applied for the job and was invited to do a monthlong trial in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia’s health-care system was developing rapidly amid an oil rush, with state-of-the-art hospitals and research centers opening across the country—but Saudi doctors were still vastly outnumbered by foreign ones, and Burdick’s recruitment was part of a drive to train new local physicians. Awed by the plentiful resources on offer at the King Faisal Hospital, and the futuristic whirl of downtown Riyadh, he accepted the job.
Before the move, Burdick and his wife, Susan, were asked to undergo routine medical checks, and hers revealed something alarming: she had advanced cervical cancer. Burdick feared that his job offer would be withdrawn, but, instead, Saudi officials flew Susan to Riyadh, checked her into the royal hospital, and brought in a renowned Danish surgeon to perform a hysterectomy. “It was extraordinary care,” Burdick said. “I felt a real debt to the Saudis.”
Soon after Burdick started work, King Fahd, the country’s ruler at the time, had a stroke, and Abdullah, the crown prince, took over. Abdullah was a heavyset smoker in his early seventies who had already suffered a heart attack, and Burdick was among the most experienced emergency doctors in the country. He was reassigned to the palace, and charged with setting up a twenty-four-hour medical operation for the crown prince. “His staff made it clear to me that money was no object,” Burdick wrote. “Whatever I wanted or needed they would fund.”
Burdick began by inspecting each of Abdullah’s palaces in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, in addition to the residences of his multiple wives, the royal yacht, and the private jet, in order to devise a plan to deliver care within fifteen seconds of any crisis. He assembled a full staff—paramedics, nurses, doctors, technicians, drivers—and ordered that Abdullah be accompanied by at least one medical professional at all times. The King’s main residences were equipped with small I.C.U.s, and Burdick ordered four custom-built ambulances—specifying that they be outfitted with racing engines, to insure they could travel at high speed and over rough terrain.
The Burdicks had initially been given an apartment in a high-rise tower, but as Dwight’s stature grew, they were moved to one of the city’s most prestigious addresses. The Al Yamama compound was a palm-fringed oasis—complete with swimming pools, a Jacuzzi, and tennis courts—whose gates were guarded at all hours by armed sentries. The couple were installed in a spacious villa, surrounded by gardens planted with bougainvillea and snapdragons. They had a live-in maid and other staff to tend the garden and wash their car. “We were living on the royal gravy train,” Burdick said.
Their new neighbors, Burdick told me, were “the cream of the crop of intellectual, educated, sophisticated Middle Eastern people.” He and Susan drove into the desert for cookouts with friends. Burdick began attending a mosque, and eventually the couple converted to Islam. Susan, who had been raised Mormon, started wearing a head scarf, and Burdick observed the five daily prayers.
The conversion allowed Burdick to travel in Abdullah’s entourage to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Soon he was dining regularly at the palace with other trusted staff. By 2005, when King Fahd died and Abdullah ascended to the throne, Burdick was an integral presence. “I was allowed free movement in his quarters,” he told me. “I was frequently there for state dinners. I travelled internationally on his plane.”
Abdullah seemed a benevolent ruler—“a good man with a real progressive international focus,” Burdick thought. Sometimes regular citizens were allowed into the palace to petition him for help. “A Bedouin would come up and say, ‘My Suburban broke down and I can’t get it out of the desert,’ ” Burdick recalled. “And Abdullah would turn to his adviser and say, ‘Get him a new Suburban.’ ” Once, he recalled, a young woman told Abdullah that she wanted to be an engineer, but that no school in the kingdom would accept female engineering students. The monarch went on to establish the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the first such mixed-gender campus in Saudi Arabia.
In 2008, as Burdick was nearing seventy, his position was turned over to a younger Saudi physician whom he had helped to train. He would be given a new role as a consultant doctor, rotating between the King’s palaces as part of a team providing ad-hoc medical care to dozens of royals. This work entailed routinely flying to Jeddah to staff the royal clinic at the sprawling palace on the shore of the Red Sea. It was there that he learned about the King’s four imprisoned daughters.
When Burdick arrived in Jeddah, the princesses were confined in a single, opulent villa. It was a “gilded cage,” he said. Though they were kept under lock and key, they were occasionally allowed to go out shopping in the custody of royal guards, and they maintained intermittent contact with their mother and a small group of supporters by cell phone, e-mail, and Skype.
The King had fathered as many as thirty-five children with a multitude of wives. Hala and her sisters were born to Alanoud Al-Fayez, a Jordanian noblewoman, whom Abdullah had married when she was fifteen and he was about fifty. For a time, the princesses had enjoyed relative freedom, studying at expensive schools and travelling with their mother. “Princess Hala had yachted, skied, traveled on private jets, ate in Michelin starred restaurants, and slept in Palaces and 5 star hotels,” Burdick wrote.
Things soured when King Abdullah turned against Al-Fayez, blaming her for their failure to produce a son. Al-Fayez recounted in a filing to the U.N. that she fled to London in 2003, hoping that her adult daughters would be able to join her. Instead, they were locked up. “I was able to leave,” she wrote. “But my girls’ destiny is shattered more day by day.”
The King’s relationship with the four princesses had been strained for some time before their mother ran away. Sahar, the eldest, wrote in an e-mail to a supporter that she and her sisters, masquerading as social workers, once visited a poor suburb of Riyadh, and were appalled at the “utter misery and misfortune” they witnessed. When they confronted their father about what they had seen, he accused them of lying, telling them, “The Kingdom is rich and has no poor!”
Hala, who wanted to pursue a career as a clinical psychologist, further infuriated the King when she spoke out about human-rights abuses she had witnessed at a hospital in Saudi Arabia. She was briefly jailed over the incident, according to Al-Fayez and Burdick. Yet the sisters continued challenging their father over the rights of women and other marginalized groups. “It is our duty to fight for our people,” Sahar wrote, from inside the villa.
Hala Aldosari, a Saudi scholar and human-rights activist, told me that Abdullah’s imprisonment of the princesses was initially designed to exact revenge on their mother, and that their continued rebellions likely prolonged it. “Women from ruling families must reinforce the power of the state,” she said. “If they challenge those norms, or express any support for any critical opinion, the repression will be severe.”
During years of close confinement, the four sisters began to quarrel. Hala’s outburst with the knife was triggered by a dispute with Sahar, and Maha was suspected of starting fires in the villa they all shared. “You put rats in a cage and they fight,” Burdick’s former colleague told me. Eventually, Hala and Maha were moved into solitary confinement in smaller villas next door.
Soon afterward, Burdick received a summons to speak to Sahar, who still shared a villa with Jawaher. She explained, imperiously, that being the eldest sister entitled her to regular medical updates on Hala and Maha. Burdick said that when he refused, citing patient confidentiality, Sahar flew into a temper, banning him from her villa. After that, he never saw Sahar or Jawaher again.
He continued to send word to Hala whenever he had a rotation in Jeddah, urging her to request a medical visit if she wanted company. “I was her contact with the outside world,” he told me. Burdick knew that their conversations were far from private; he had seen the palace security center, where officials monitored feeds from cameras and microphones that covered every inch of the royal compound, with the exception of the King’s private quarters. Hala was cautious, too, he said; when she wanted to say something sensitive, she would play loud music and reduce her voice to a whisper.
Burdick was awed by the princess, whom he described as “brilliant, artistic, intellectual, educated, multilingual, athletic.” She was then in her thirties, and Burdick had children of the same age; he came to see her as a daughter. “She could converse articulately on any subject. She knew science, she knew psychology. Hala just had this immense potential,” he said.
But it was clear to Burdick that Hala was addicted to the benzodiazepines that he was signing off on. Alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines also seemed to flow freely into the villa. “You put some alcohol on top of Librium, Xanax, the benzodiazepines, and you get a very sedate, manageable person,” Burdick told me. Hala was candid about her dependencies, sometimes openly swigging from a liquor bottle. She would say, “This is the way I deal with it. What do you expect me to do?”
Burdick also tended to Maha—the second oldest of the four sisters. Susan was a yoga instructor, and years earlier Maha had attended a couple of her classes; she had told Burdick that her royal student was widely considered the most elegant of all the King’s daughters: “Everyone at the spa just raved every time Princess Maha came—Oh, Maha’s here!” But by the time Burdick encountered her, Maha was bloated from her medication, spaced out, and spiralling into mental illness. “Maha was becoming progressively more paranoid,” Burdick told me. There was only one place in the compound where she felt it was safe to talk: a curb outside her villa where she believed there were no listening devices.
When Maha or Hala was acting out, Burdick said, palace medics were repeatedly urged to “get some soldiers in” and sedate them—but he refused. “The appropriate response was to talk them down, not to sedate them,” he said.
Meanwhile, he kept writing orders for their tranquillizers. “That was an ethical compromise on my part,” he told me. “I had to maintain a relationship, particularly with Hala.” Burdick’s former colleague, also a foreigner, told me that Burdick confided in him often about his “ethical and moral concerns,” and that he tried to offer reassurance. “I said, ‘Look, you know, none of this is ideal. None of this is how we would do it at home.’ ” But, he went on, “You don’t have to worry about people complaining or something, because it’s just not going to happen. Nothing’s ever going to leave the confines of the palace grounds.”
Still, Burdick felt that he needed to use his position to do more than just provide the princesses with a listening ear. He had to try to find a way to free them.
Burdick began devising a plan. The princesses’ health was deteriorating, and he hoped to use the urgency of the situation to persuade his superiors to release them for treatment abroad. “I was desperate to try to find something that would give me some leverage,” he told me. He studied for a certification in addiction medicine to bolster his credentials, and then outlined a radical proposal in memos to palace officials.
“The situation in Jeddah involving the medical care of several patients with clinical syndromes involving benzodiazepine addiction is of growing concern,” Burdick wrote, warning that the problem could be exacerbated by the use of “other addictive substances, such as alcohol and/or ‘street drugs.’ ” Burdick proposed to fly in American addiction specialists to stage an intervention, and to bring Hala to the Betty Ford Center, in California, hoping that her sisters might later be able to join her.
The plan was stonewalled. “Administrative staff members of the Royal Clinics advised me to discontinue my efforts as the Sisters would probably never be allowed to again leave the Kingdom, and further, that my efforts could aggravate their situation and place me in jeopardy,” Burdick wrote. He said he was told, “Just do your job.”
Nevertheless, Burdick imagined that, if he could help the princesses taper off the drugs, there might be a way to persuade the King to grant them their freedom. “In my fantasy, I saw them clean and sober and out on their own. And that was one of the things Hala and I talked about quite a bit,” he told me.
With his support, he said, Hala gradually got off drugs and stopped drinking. As she worked to stay sober, she began to dream of a future beyond the palace walls. She loved Italy, and told Burdick she wanted to live there one day. Most of the King’s other daughters were allowed to travel—why not her? No matter where she went, she reasoned, she would never really be beyond the bounds of her father’s authority, because her wealth was a kind of prison. “I’ve been raised in luxury. I’ve had everything done for me,” Burdick recalled her telling him. “That gives them absolute control over me. If I do anything or threaten anything, they can withhold the money and I’ll cave in.”
Burdick encouraged Hala to make this case to the King. She was permitted to join her father for dinner, but when she returned she was despondent. “What he said was, ‘We need to find you a good Saudi Muslim husband, get you married, and then we can talk about releasing your restrictions,’ ” Burdick said. “And she said, ‘I’m not going to have a Saudi husband. I’m not going to have a Muslim husband. I’m not going to do any of that.’ And so that was the last exposure she had to her father.”
After the dinner, Hala relapsed, Burdick said. By 2014, she had grown so desperate that she went through spells of starving herself. That March, Burdick sent two memos reporting that Hala’s health was being threatened by “inadequate nutrition” and excessive drug use, and that she complained of water leaks, fungal contamination, and pest infestations in her villa. By then, he said, he had accepted that his efforts to free her were futile. But, he added, “I did what I could to ease the suffering.”
A week after Burdick sent those memos, Channel 4 News, in London, broadcast an interview with the princesses’ mother, Al-Fayez, who accused the King of orchestrating her daughters’ torture and imprisonment. “They are really in a terrible state,” she told the interviewer, Fatima Manji. “They don’t deserve what happened to them.”
Al-Fayez had lost contact with Hala and Maha after they were moved into their isolated villas, but she remained in touch with Sahar and Jawaher. She had already filed a complaint to the U.N., in which she described how the princesses were being drugged and kept under “relentless surveillance” by armed guards. “My daughters are truly persecuted by every possible means,” she wrote. “They are prisoners, kidnapped, cut off from the world. They are in constant danger.” She had learned that Hala was suffering from “severe anorexia” and had been denied medical care. But no response had come.
Soon after the Channel 4 interview was broadcast, Sahar and Jawaher spoke with Manji via a video call. “We are hostages,” Sahar said, sitting beside her sister in an orange blouse and a head scarf. “It’s psychologically tormenting.” Hala was aghast when she learned that they had spoken out. “This is going to be devastating,” she told Burdick. Publicly, the Saudi authorities rebuffed questions about the princesses, describing their situation as “a private matter.” Behind the scenes, the palace retaliated viciously against Sahar and Jawaher.
Burdick told me that food deliveries to the sisters’ villa were halted and their water supply began to be shut off. “It was really draconian,” he said. He had use of an official car, meaning he could enter the princesses’ compound without inspection, and he began smuggling in food on his visits. Leftovers from the King’s banquet table were often given to staff, Burdick said, and he would gather these up and deliver them to Hala, who would climb the wall between the villas and lower the food to her sisters.
For a time, Sahar and Jawaher continued getting word to their supporters about the conditions they were enduring. Men came in to cane them, they said, and their villa was overrun with rodents and other pests. Ali Al-Ahmed, a dissident Saudi scholar who kept in touch with Sahar, sent me a photograph of an apparatus that the sisters had jerry-rigged to distill fresh water from the sea, and one of a copper hook for catching fish and crabs. They shared what they caught with their dog, he said, but the animal eventually starved to death.
Al-Fayez had begun protesting outside the Saudi Embassy in London, and continued to petition the U.N. In May, 2014, two Special Rapporteurs from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights finally wrote to the Saudi government, expressing “grave concern at the allegations of ill-treatment, abuse and neglect.” But the government did not reply, and press attention soon subsided.
Sahar knew that her father was close to death, and she was afraid, Al-Ahmed told me, of what would happen to her and her sisters after he was gone. When news broke that Abdullah had died, in January, 2015, he was fêted as a progressive monarch. Christine Lagarde, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, described him as a “strong advocate of women”; John Kerry hailed him as a “man of wisdom & vision.” Al-Ahmed wrote to Sahar, but she didn’t reply. “The same week their father died, boom, there was nothing,” he told me. Al-Fayez also stopped responding. She gave up protesting outside the embassy, cut off contact with people who had been assisting her campaign, and shut down her Twitter and e-mail accounts.
Burdick told me that the princesses’ electronic devices had by then been confiscated. He surmised that Al-Fayez had ceased campaigning because “the restrictions just got unbearable,” and she feared making matters worse. When he asked his superiors what impact the monarch’s passing would have on his daughters, he said that he was told, “Nothing will change.”
On his visits to Hala and Maha, the sense of despair was stifling. The sisters sat listening to music and staring into space. Hala sometimes did pen-and-ink drawings, and she still read, but she was growing more and more emaciated, and her drinking and drug use were out of control. “I could see her going downhill, and I couldn’t seem to get her to stop, and I think she didn’t want to,” he told me. “It became totally apparent that there was nothing I could do that would free the sisters.”
Burdick had lived away from his adult children in the U.S. for almost two decades. He and Susan, resigned to the hopelessness of the situation, decided it was time to go home. As they prepared to leave, Susan was allowed to visit Maha and offer her one last yoga class, meeting her in a room of the villa that overlooked the Red Sea. When Susan saw her former student, she was aghast. “Her hair was all falling out, she was all puffy, and was just kind of out of it,” she said. “If I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand, I would not have believed it, or not wanted to believe it,” she went on. “Everybody said that Abdullah loved women.”
Burdick continued visiting Hala in his last months in Saudi Arabia. The King, shortly before his death, had sent her a Turbo Bentley coupé, which she was permitted to drive around the circular driveway in front of her villa. Burdick would sit in the passenger seat as she played loud music and talked about Italy. On his final visit, he recalled, she swigged continuously from a bottle of whisky. “By the time I left, she was drunk,” he said. “I felt acutely aware of the futility of all the efforts I had put in.” He had written Hala a letter, and he handed her the envelope as they said goodbye. “I don’t know whether she ever read it,” he told me. He had kept a copy, and, as he read it to me over the phone, his voice thickened with tears. “It has been my pleasure and my great honor to have been invited to spend time with you,” he had written. “So many things will so frequently remind me of you—music, cinema, literature, art, culture, sport, beauty, youth, all of that, and more, for the rest of my life.”
Burdick spoke to me from a beach house that he and Susan share, on a barrier island off the Texas coast. “It’s been a preoccupation for me for more than ten years now,” he said, of his experience with the princesses. Susan said that the horror of their circumstances has cast a long shadow over Burdick: “He feels like he failed. But there was nothing that he could have done.”
In September, 2021, Burdick learned from friends in Saudi Arabia that Princess Hala had died from “an unnamed chronic disease process.” An official statement from the royal court announced her death without any explanation. “May God bestow His mercy, forgiveness and satisfaction upon her and grant her a place in His spacious heavens,” it read. Six months later, word spread that Princess Maha had died. Though her death was not announced officially by the palace, it was acknowledged on social media by the King Abdullah Humanitarian Foundation, and a prominent royal watcher posted videos of members of the royal family receiving “condolences and sympathy.”
Al-Ahmed told me the deaths of Hala and Maha were a stain on the Saudi regime which should draw condemnation from the international community. “This is the evil of the Saudi dictatorship, to do this to its own daughters. This is the last level of evil, the highest level of evil,” he said. “The current regime, under King Salman, this is the worst it’s been for human rights in a hundred years.” ♦