After reigning for three months, Murad was deposed on 30 August 1876,[10] due to mental instability and was imprisoned in Çırağan Palace by his half-brother Abdülhamid II.

The latter consider it his duty to find husbands for her and her half-sister Fehime Sultan, but on one condition: that once they leave the palace they may not return.

Abdul Hamid realized that if he introduced his own daughters to the Empress but didn't include them they would feel quite hurt, so he had them participate in the ceremony as well.

[20] Abdul Hamid decided to marry Hatice to Kabasakal Çerkes Mehmed Pasha, widower of princesses Naile Sultan.

[21] Finally in 1901, Abdul Hamid arranged her marriage [22] to one of her father's table servants who was given the title "Ali Vasıf Pasha, Code Scribe".

According to Filitzen Hanim, Murad V's last consort, the relationship was consummated, while according to the son of the governor of Bursa, who was holding Kemaleddin under house arrest, it consisted only of letters thrown over the wall that separated their gardens and fleeting encounters.

The two were eventually accused of wanting to poison their respective consorts in order to get married, and, according to Filitzan, the pain and shame for his favourite daughter led to Murad V's death.

While Kemaleddin was surely in love with her (in his letters he frequently lamented her absence, asked when they could meet and if they could meet earlier than established, and recounted one time in which he slowed down in front of his villa to see her exit hers and get in the carriage), Filitzan and Hatice's granddaughter argue that seducing the husband of Naime, Abdülhamid II's favourite daughter, was just a way to take revenge for the wrongs she and her family had suffered from him who had imprisoned her father in Çırağan Palace for years, and didn't arrange her marriage until the age of thirty, and then married her to someone she never loved.

In any case, when Kemaleddin, after the divorces, asked her to marry him, she refused him, out of pride, because "she did not accept the scraps of another princess" or because at that point she was already infatuated with the man who would become her second husband.

He had Naime Sultan divorce her husband, then he stripped Kemaleddin Pasha of all his military honours and exiled him to Bursa.

[31] Semih Mümtaz, whose father, the Governor of Bursa, was charged with guarding Kemaleddin Pasha in his internal exile, mentions nothing about a plot to poison Naime, but rather claims that the affair between Hatice Sultan and Kemaleddin Pasha consisted of the exchange of love letters tossed over the garden wall.

[32] Abdul Hamid later forgave Hatice and she was invited again to Yıldız Palace, but he did not give her permission to divorce her husband.

Hatice finally obtained permission to divorce around 1908, when Abdülhamid II was deposed and replaced by Mehmed V, his younger half-brother.

With the declaration of the Second Constitutional Era in 1908, Kemaleddin Paşa was forgiven and returned to Istanbul to ask her to marry him; the princess refused.

Eventually, Hatice settled in a mansion which she shared with Arife Kadriye Sultan, the granddaughter of one of her father's half-brothers.

She also worked to help those of her father's consorts who, as widows, had been freed by Çırağa Palace but reduced to poverty due to the reduction or suspension of their salaries.

[42] As a result of the exile of the imperial family in March 1924, Hatice Sultan and her two children settled in Beirut, Lebanon.