Interview With The Grand Daughter Of His Majesty

Yeshi Kassa was a great-granddaughter of Haile Selassie, the previous emperor of Ethiopia. In a recent documentary, she talks about the horrifying treatment her family received during the revolution. Kassa said that the late Queen had quietly conveyed her approval of the documentary when speaking with Insider about it. Yeshi Kassa was attending boarding school in the UK when Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie was toppled in a coup in 1974.

Since Kassa and her sister were in Wales thousands of miles away, they were unable to observe the unrest that erupted in Ethiopia following the coup. According to a 1994 report, the emperor was murdered by Marxist army officers in 1975, and Kassa’s mother and grandmother were two of the 12 kidnapped royal family members.

Although Selassie’s fate was first unknown, it was later determined that he had been slain by being strangled in his bed when those responsible were on trial, according to the report. Kassa described her peaceful exile to Insider; she worked as a commodity broker in England before relocating to the US with her family once they were freed from prison a while later. She refrained from addressing herself as a king or revealing the horrors she and her family endured in public. However, Kassa examines the events that led to the disintegration of Ethiopia’s 3,000-year-old royal dynasty in the recently released documentary “Grandpa Was An Emperor,” which was directed by Constance Marks and first appeared on streaming sites.