Heidi Blake writes:

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.

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. [Continue reading…]