Perhaps, but you can be sure that there are still many more out there doing the same stuff today. The only reason these men get exposed is when they are older and have lost their power over others (or died like al-Fayed). Bill Cosby is a perfect example. He was doing his dope-and-rape for decades. Nobody would believe a word against him. He was beloved. Only when he was an old geezer who no longer held any sway in the entertainment business were the accusations finally taken seriously.
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Mohamed Al-Fayed former owner of Harrod's accused of sexual assault
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knows
justice in the form that it may come.
And it takes tremendous courage & strength of character to testify against these animals
because they are very much ostracized & their lives greatly impacted
Bill Cosby in spite of how much he was "beloved" he is deeply abhorrent & his name is
disgraced, the same with Harvey Weinstein & others, but their victims had their day in court
including ****. so no, the rich & famous don't always get away with it all, their victims very well
may have the last word. That in itself is powerful.
Young or old, dead or alive, this is about the victims having their day in court & getting
justice in the form that it may come.
And it takes tremendous courage & strength of character to testify against these animals
because they are very much ostracized & their lives greatly impacted
Bill Cosby in spite of how much he was "beloved" he is deeply abhorrent & his name is
disgraced, the same with Harvey Weinstein & others, but their victims had their day in court
including ****. so no, the rich & famous don't always get away with it all, their victims very well
may have the last word. That in itself is powerful.
Last edited:
Everybody knew about al-Fayed. As a teen, I was warned, multiple times by different people. Everybody knew, nobody did anything.
Al-Fayed could have had a beautiful call girl every day of the week, anytime. He chose to prey on the unsuspecting and vulnerable.
It now makes me think about Princess Diana. She will have been told 100 times too, and as an adult with responsibilities, and yet she put herself in the middle, accepting hospitality, wining and dining.
It was not unusual back when I started working in the 1990’s. Men in power got away with murder in those days, teaching the younger ones what was acceptable. Of course, this was the time of enormous business accounts and 2 hours lunch and business deals done at Scores. It was wild.
Most girls knew to never be alone with some of those types of men. But they knew who to harass and take advantage of, ie the naive young college graduates, the women who were desperate to keep their jobs and on and on.
Diana thought that she was above it all. In a way, she was, the family put her on a pedestal and indulged in all her caprices.
Since they died together, Diana and Dodi have been irrevocably linked romantically. It has been forgotten that they had only been dating for several weeks. I thought he was a rebound to help her get over the doctor and it wouldn’t have gone far but who knows. She was having fun that summer and I doubt she gave any thought to what her new boyfriend’s father was doing.
Because people are scared to lose their jobs or worst.
Many women were mocked and then blackmailed in their respective industry.
It is not easy to stand up for yourself.
As far as why they are coming out now? It will come out at the trials.
Sickening. Glad people are coming forward. Can anyone with UK legal background explain if his estate will be impacted if he is found guilty? Or is it all Harrod's responsibility since it happened in their workplace?
Agree. I predict they deeply feared this man when he was alive. This type is typically plagued with some type of personality disorder that makes them a safety threat to victims.
It was his sympathetic portrayal in the last season of The Crown that was the last straw for some victims who came forward. Once one person comes forward, it gives courage to others to speak up.
As @papertiger stated, he sold Harrods 14 years ago. Could Harrods have done more while he was their owner? I'd imagine few would have been strong enough to expose him and stand up for the victims. Likely he would have had them fired and silenced in some way. The courts will figure out how much responsibility Harrods had at the time. I just hope it is his estate that has to pay the lions share of any settlement to the victims.
Full disclaimer, I studied the wrong kind of law at uni (music and entertainment) but I shared a flat with would-be barristers.
Sorry to say, in the UK, the law applies to different people differently - and which lawyers are hired.
The victims and their lawyers are going after Harrods because they can't go after his estate since he is no longer living and the estate is either in trust or now someone else's. It's going to be a long stretch though. How are current management responsible for what happened under previous ownership/team? You could say that many who were employed by Al Fayed were also under threat of losing their jobs - and not getting another.
Even before he died, victims were told "he's too old" to prosecute. It implies strings were pulled, there is no upper-limit to years of responsibility for crimes committed. It's only sentencing that may take into account personal circumstances. In 2016 a man was prosecuted and convicted for sex offenses at the age of 101 and was sentenced to 13 years. So how was Al Fayed ever too old?
At the time The Head of (Al Fayed's) Security was ex-police. He turned-up at a victim's/witness house after she reported the abuse - after she moved address . Implication, calling in favours from his ex-mates? Many of his security were ex-police and ex-military. Would anyone blame Harrod's staff for not whistle blowing or crossing their boss?
Some of the abuse happened in France. Fayed was often in France. I wonder how many he SAd at the Ritz, Paris or in his employ at the Windsor's former home?
Diana and Dodi died in '97. Boy, did he milk the grieving father and 'almost' Diana's FIL cr*p. People literally felt sorry for this man.
Last edited:
I should also say. One of the worst abuses was the company's policy of sending these young women to a Harley Street doctor for a medical - before employment. As part of that medical, the doctor performed a sexual examination.
It's very rare in the UK (non-military) people have to have a medical exam before starting a job because most companies don't usually offer health insurance.
That's not the worst part. It was clear to some of these victims that the results were given to Al Fayed even before the the person examined.
I would like to see Wendy Snell, the Harrods doctor questioned.
It's very rare in the UK (non-military) people have to have a medical exam before starting a job because most companies don't usually offer health insurance.
That's not the worst part. It was clear to some of these victims that the results were given to Al Fayed even before the the person examined.
I would like to see Wendy Snell, the Harrods doctor questioned.
This may shed more light. It's about a video that was faked that would discredit the rest of the evidence/testimony.
I found an article written a quarter of a century ago.
Hamilton v Al-Fayed case
This article is more than 25 years old (1998)
A new biography of the Harrod's owner reveals him as a vindictive, sexually- obsessed bully. Some who displease him have been bugged and even detained. When Henry Porter investigated these allegations he found himself cast into a murky world where few things were as they seemed
Henry Porter
Sat 24 Oct 1998 16.22 BST
My first thought on meeting Mohamed Fayed's security guard was to wonder where he had hidden the bug. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, so it seemed unlikely that he was carrying the device himself. Perhaps he had rigged up the east London hotel where he had suggested we could talk undisturbed. I did not know what to look for, so for the first few minutes of our talk I put my wariness down to paranoia, and listened to what the guard, Paul Handley-Greaves, had to say.
His story was bizarre. He told me he had been dismissed from Fayed's security staff because he was having an affair with another Harrods employee, something which was expressly forbidden by Mohamed Fayed. He was now looking for similar work in the United States, but he needed money. So he had approached Vanity Fair magazine, of which I am London editor, which he knew was engaged in a bitter libel dispute with Fayed. His proposition was simple. For £5,000, he would hand over a secretly-recorded video of Fayed making love to an employee in a suite of offices at the store.
He thought that we might be interested because the Vanity Fair article alleged to be libellous had, among other things, accused the owner of Harrods of routinely harassing his female staff.
But when Handley-Greaves started talking sums of money with a kind of leering eagerness, I sensed we were being recorded.
David Hooper, a lawyer for the magazine publishers Conde Nast, and I had been investigating Fayed's affairs for a year, and we had learned that evidence simply didn't fall into our laps like this. We had found several women who had been sexually harassed by Fayed, and other employees who had been bugged, intimidated and bullied. But it had taken considerable effort to track them down and then persuade them to give us sworn statements about their experiences. Besides, Handley-Greaves and his story didn't feel quite right, and the video seemed just too convenient. We concluded that it was almost certainly a plan to contaminate the rest of our genuine evidence and force the magazine to fold its case.
Our suspicions turned out to be right. My conversation in the hotel was indeed recorded and Handley-Greaves, far from being a disgruntled ex-employee, was still very much at the heart of Fayed's operations. Within a few months, Fayed's lawyers made an unsuccessful complaint to the City police in London that we were trying to buy stolen property - which was a surreal notion, since there was never any evidence that a video had even existed. Moreover, we were able to demonstrate that we had been wise to Handley-Greaves in our first meeting, and had been intrigued by his performance.
What we all grasped then was that once someone takes on the owner of Harrods, they enter a world where few things are what they seem. We never knew if the other side were listening to us, and we were constantly on our guard for traps. We were advised that Fayed's people would have copies of private telephone bills, which meant that they knew who we were talking to.
In the end, we prevailed because there were so many witnesses willing to support our original allegations. The Vanity Fair case did not go to trial.
We were jubilant, but we were also left with the eerie sense that we had been dealing with a foreign power: a fiefdom, which despite its real location in Knightsbridge, operated quite independently from the rest of Britain, with a security service of its own, an armed police force and a tyrant in command.
Tom Bower's new and unauthorised biography of Fayed (Macmillan, £18.99) captures this sense perfectly. For the first time, Fayed's life is properly assembled. All the evasions about his past have been stripped away, his bluster and clowning laid aside, while the pompous effusions of his spokesman, the former BBC journalist Michael Cole, are forgotten.
What remains is a story that began in Alexandria with the boy Mohamed selling Coca-Cola and sewing machines and ended with him in his sixties sitting on the deck of a vast yacht, one arm wrapped around the waist of an unprotesting Princess of Wales, the other indicating the doubtful opportunity presented by his son, Dodi.
It is a remarkable trajectory which involved much self-invention and paranoia, double-dealing and boasting. He hired helicopters and Rolls-Royces to impress, described his father as a 'pasha', and dished out paste diamonds to his girlfriends. One of his lines was: 'I built Dubai, you know. Dubai's wealth is all due to Mohamed Fayed.' He was so preposterous and his manners so coarse that few noticed his guile and demonic drive. He snatched Harrods from the grasp of Tiny Rowland, no mean feat, considering Tiny's cunning - and deceived practically everyone who had been given the responsibility to investigate the origins of his wealth. Few bothered to question his assertions about Dubai, or to investigate his less-advertised links with the Sultan of Brunei, because they were more alarmed at the idea that Tiny Rowland would own Harrods if Fayed did not get it.
So Fayed was sitting next to Carol Thatcher at a dinner, and very soon after that Norman Tebbit announced that there would be no inquiry into Fayed's acquisition of the store. 'Fayed was the victor,' writes Bower, 'he was no longer the commission agent, a middleman, a servant and a groveller to kings and sheihks. He was the principal, who had the power to say 'I don't need that person'. '
As Bower observes, the singular nature of Harrods itself is central to the Fayed story. 'No other store offered the certainty of meeting the famous,' he writes. 'The world of Harrods was not only a place of work, but also the hub of social life. Friendships and marriages were forged in the shop.' Fayed would not have comprehended this concept of his purchase. He believed that he had captured a citadel of the British establishment, and it is clear that he also saw Harrods as his personal kingdom, where the employees were his subjects.
His private army of ex-SAS soldiers increased to match his status. They wore fatigues on duty at his home in Oxted, Surrey and stood to attention when he entered the room. Bower reveals that Fayed's guards were issued with Walther PPK handguns, and, in the country home there was a locker which contained pump-action shotguns, semi-automatics, revolvers and a 32mm machine gun, from the Middle East.
As with senior employees at Harrods, the guards' lives were made more tolerable by handouts of £50 notes. For these, they were expected to keep their mouths shut and carry out Fayed's bizarre orders unquestioningly. On election day in 1992, Fayed told a former SAS trooper, John Evans, to shoot his ginger tomcat, on the grounds that it was dirty. (Fayed has a famous dread of germs.) Evans, a veteran of Ulster who has the Military Medal, shot the wrong cat. Bower wrote: 'Hearing the news from the housekeeper, Fayed exploded: 'Fuggin' nothing is fugging done properly'. ' Evans was then required to ambush the right cat, but the cat escaped into the house with a bleeding head.
During our battle with Fayed, we gained extraordinary glimpses of his set-up at Oxted. One came from a woman named Pip Dumbill, a temporary nanny to Fayed's three children. All we knew was that she was called Pip and came from Australia or New Zealand. After five months of search and some luck, we located her in the Himalayas. A fax was posted on the outside of a hut which housed the local communications centre. Five minutes later, Pip Dumbill happened to pass the hut, saw the Vanity Fair notepaper flapping in the wind and called us.
She told us how she was sitting in her room at Oxted one weekend evening when the internal phone rang. It was Fayed, suggesting that they have a drink. She agreed hesitantly and asked where she should go. He told her not to leave her room until he arrived, which he did a few minutes later, in his dressing-gown.
Then he took her by the hand and led her a convoluted route through the darkened house because, as he explained, he did not want to be spotted by his security cameras. Once in his bedroom suite, he made a pass, offering her £100 to sleep with him, which she declined.
Fayed's lunge for Pip Dumbill was not one-off. It was part of a pattern. He would select his target and insist that she have a medical examination, which included an Aids test. Once the woman had been cleared by a Harley Street doctor, he would make the pass. This was preceded by his original chat-up lines - 'How's your pussy?' and 'Did you have a good fug over the weekend?' Another female employee came to our notice after she had successfully sued Fayed for wrongful dismissal. Fayed had persuaded Hermina da Silva to join him in his bedroom, where he attempted to seduce her with kisses and fondles. Da Silva rejected his advances and later gave in her notice, saying that she had been forced to leave by his behaviour.
It was at this stage that John Macnamara, an ex-policeman who now runs all Fayed's security operations was brought in to deal with the threat she posed. He made false allegations of theft against da Silva, as a result of which she was arrested. She was released without charge and, showing considerable courage, pursued her case, eventually receiving compensation of £12,000.
We were constantly struck by the way Fayed's senior personnel appeared in some cases to be immune from the law. No charges or official investigation followed the da Silva incident, nor the discovery of crack cocaine equipment in a bag containing Salah Fayed's passport.
Salah, one of Mohamed's younger brothers was travelling to Scotland with his personal assistant, a young woman named Rachel Crowe. During the journey, they left the bag in a cab. The driver handed it in to the police, who found equipment for smoking crack cocaine. When Mohamed Fayed heard about the arrest he said: 'Tell the police that the bag belonged to the girl.' His considerable influence was brought to bear on the Scottish police and the incident was hushed up.
We traced Rachel Crowe to southwest London. Although she had long since left the Fayeds' employment and was now working as an air hostess, she would not speak about the incident. I remember her standing in the doorway shivering, her eyes simultaneously betraying anxiety and rapid calculation. 'Please,' she said, 'never, never contact me again. Please!'
The fear that Fayed's people inspired in potential witnesses was striking. David Hooper's team never pushed them, for the memories were sometimes painful. I remember one interview with a woman whom I shall call Candida. After about 20 minutes, her considerable poise disappeared with a sudden convulsion of self-loathing. 'You have to understand,' she said. 'I simply cannot bear for people to know what happened to me. It is my lifelong shame.'
We knew that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg, much of which has now been revealed by Tom Bower's inquiries. As I read his narrative and recall our evidence, I found myself amazed that Mohamed Fayed has got away with so much for so long. The harassment alone makes Bill ******* look like a hesitant teenager. Then there are the huge surveillance operations, the racism and persecution of employees who have left Harrods.
You no longer wonder why there was doubt about Fayed's application to become a British citizen. Indeed, you wonder why the man is not facing several official investigations. Part of his success has been to persuade the British that doubts about his ownership of Harrods were entirely motivated by our racism. Fayed has always depicted himself as the outsider, the simple man of honour and enterprise who had been rebuffed by the British establishment because he was an Arab. This line, repeated over the years by his spokesman Michael Cole, has served him rather well. He has been given the benefit of many doubts because he is an Arab. This ploy is richly ironic when you learn about the institutionalised racism at Harrods.
There was the case of Sandra Lewis-Glass; Vanity Fair contacted her after her appearance at an industrial tribunal. Lewis-Glass was employed to handle the short-term letting of flats at Fayed's Hyde Park residence - numbers 55 and 60 Park Lane. One of her less appealing duties was to ensure that no blacks occupied the flats in 60 Park Lane, where Fayed lived. It was not easy for Lewis-Glass. Her own father is black.
Eventually, she fell foul of Fayed when he began to suspect her of betraying him to Westminster City Council, which had learned that Fayed's company was reporting the lets as long leases to avoid paying higher business rates on short tenancies. Lewis-Glass was fired and on the same day was followed by an undercover surveillance team, reporting to John Macnamara. At a restaurant, the team secretly recorded her saying that she wished she had not left vital computer discs, which would prove the deception over short-term lets in her office. Within a few days, Lewis-Glass was arrested on suspicion of stealing two floppy discs worth 80p each. She was held for nearly 20 hours, before being released without charge.
Fayed's ability to influence events and threaten former employees extends well beyond Harrods. As Bower remarks, Fayed could not only buy MPs, he could also, through Macnamara, launch police investigations.
Occasionally, Macnamara's undercover operations reached to Europe and the Middle East, most sensationally in the case of Christoph Bettermann, a former managing director of Harrods. In 1991, Macnamara informed Fayed that Betterman, previously a marine salvage expert, had been talking to a headhunter. He knew this because he had bugged Bettermann's private line.
When confronted by Fayed, Bettermann guessed what had happened and resigned, at which point Fayed threatened him: 'If you stay with me, I'll make you rich; but if you leave me, I'll destroy you.' Bettermann ignored the warning and left. Eight months later, in 1992, Bettermann was arrested in Dubai on charges of embezzling $900,000. Behind this was an outrageous letter from Fayed to the Crown Prince of Sharjah, which alleged that Bettermann had embezzled millions of dollars. There was also a tape recording made - and, it is believed, doctored - by Macnamara, which suggested that Bettermann had admitted the fraud.
'Sitting in a cage among common criminals for the first of 24 court hearings,' writes Bower, 'Bettermann was presented with the transcript of his conversation with Macnamara in Spain. Naively, he had accepted Macnamara's word that he was not being secretly recorded.' All charges were subsequently dropped in Dubai, but it was a clear lesson for anyone who worked at Harrods.
If this was the way a former managing director was treated by Fayed, what would he do to a floor manager or sales assistant who crossed him? All the old spirit of Harrods had gone. Now people watched what they said on the phone and reminded themselves that every corner of the store was covered by closed-circuit TV cameras. They could not even be sure of their colleagues, for there was a network of informers reporting to Fayed's office.
Bettermann returned to Britain to sue Fayed for libel contained in that letter to the Crown Prince. On the morning of the trial, Fayed's lawyers failed to turn up to contest the case. Bettermann received maximum damages and costs, but he was never compensated for the time he spent in jail, and was robbed of a much-needed public apology.
It is worrying that Fayed possesses powers of intimidation and extremely troubling to know that nothing has been done to investigate links between Macnamara and certain police stations in London and the home counties.
Perhaps the publication of Bower's account will prompt such an investigation.
But for the moment there is an interesting lesson from the experiences of da Silva, Lewis-Glass, Jones and Bettermann about Fayed's personality. He has an elemental vindictiveness. It is the characteristic responsible for his feud against Tiny Rowland. It also inspired him to turn on the Conservative Party in the cash-for-questions and Jonathan Aitken scandals. The British public has benefited from his desire for revenge, but we should remind ourselves that Fayed was part of an extremely questionable transaction. If he had gained all that he wanted from Ian Greer, Neil Hamilton, Tim Smith and Sir Michael Grylls, then we would never have heard of those sleaze allegations.
However, it is worth noting that despite revelations about Fayed's dishonesty, no serious doubt has been raised over the allegations made against Hamilton and other MPs. After investigating Fayed's life for almost a year, Bower has declared himself satisfied that Hamilton and Smith did accept cash in exchange for parliamentary questions.
It is impossible to ignore the evidence in Bower's book. At the least, Fayed emerges as an extremely nasty piece of work who has traded on a caricature of victimhood, while causing misery among his employees and those he set out to woo to advance his status in Britain. Bower establishes the lies, the harassment, the bugging of phone conversations and the vilification in Fayed's Knightsbridge fiefdom.
Fayed's story has not ended. The Parisian authorities have yet to report on the crash in which Diana and Dodi died. And next week Fayed is due to defend himself in a civil case brought by the widow of Tiny Rowland. Things do not look good for him. As Bower concludes: 'Like so many autocrats, Fayed has become his own worst enemy. The inevitable consequence will be the collapse of his empire.'
I found an article written a quarter of a century ago.
Hamilton v Al-Fayed case
This article is more than 25 years old (1998)
Crossing swords with Mohamed
A new biography of the Harrod's owner reveals him as a vindictive, sexually- obsessed bully. Some who displease him have been bugged and even detained. When Henry Porter investigated these allegations he found himself cast into a murky world where few things were as they seemed
Henry Porter
Sat 24 Oct 1998 16.22 BST
My first thought on meeting Mohamed Fayed's security guard was to wonder where he had hidden the bug. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, so it seemed unlikely that he was carrying the device himself. Perhaps he had rigged up the east London hotel where he had suggested we could talk undisturbed. I did not know what to look for, so for the first few minutes of our talk I put my wariness down to paranoia, and listened to what the guard, Paul Handley-Greaves, had to say.
His story was bizarre. He told me he had been dismissed from Fayed's security staff because he was having an affair with another Harrods employee, something which was expressly forbidden by Mohamed Fayed. He was now looking for similar work in the United States, but he needed money. So he had approached Vanity Fair magazine, of which I am London editor, which he knew was engaged in a bitter libel dispute with Fayed. His proposition was simple. For £5,000, he would hand over a secretly-recorded video of Fayed making love to an employee in a suite of offices at the store.
He thought that we might be interested because the Vanity Fair article alleged to be libellous had, among other things, accused the owner of Harrods of routinely harassing his female staff.
But when Handley-Greaves started talking sums of money with a kind of leering eagerness, I sensed we were being recorded.
David Hooper, a lawyer for the magazine publishers Conde Nast, and I had been investigating Fayed's affairs for a year, and we had learned that evidence simply didn't fall into our laps like this. We had found several women who had been sexually harassed by Fayed, and other employees who had been bugged, intimidated and bullied. But it had taken considerable effort to track them down and then persuade them to give us sworn statements about their experiences. Besides, Handley-Greaves and his story didn't feel quite right, and the video seemed just too convenient. We concluded that it was almost certainly a plan to contaminate the rest of our genuine evidence and force the magazine to fold its case.
Our suspicions turned out to be right. My conversation in the hotel was indeed recorded and Handley-Greaves, far from being a disgruntled ex-employee, was still very much at the heart of Fayed's operations. Within a few months, Fayed's lawyers made an unsuccessful complaint to the City police in London that we were trying to buy stolen property - which was a surreal notion, since there was never any evidence that a video had even existed. Moreover, we were able to demonstrate that we had been wise to Handley-Greaves in our first meeting, and had been intrigued by his performance.
What we all grasped then was that once someone takes on the owner of Harrods, they enter a world where few things are what they seem. We never knew if the other side were listening to us, and we were constantly on our guard for traps. We were advised that Fayed's people would have copies of private telephone bills, which meant that they knew who we were talking to.
In the end, we prevailed because there were so many witnesses willing to support our original allegations. The Vanity Fair case did not go to trial.
We were jubilant, but we were also left with the eerie sense that we had been dealing with a foreign power: a fiefdom, which despite its real location in Knightsbridge, operated quite independently from the rest of Britain, with a security service of its own, an armed police force and a tyrant in command.
Tom Bower's new and unauthorised biography of Fayed (Macmillan, £18.99) captures this sense perfectly. For the first time, Fayed's life is properly assembled. All the evasions about his past have been stripped away, his bluster and clowning laid aside, while the pompous effusions of his spokesman, the former BBC journalist Michael Cole, are forgotten.
What remains is a story that began in Alexandria with the boy Mohamed selling Coca-Cola and sewing machines and ended with him in his sixties sitting on the deck of a vast yacht, one arm wrapped around the waist of an unprotesting Princess of Wales, the other indicating the doubtful opportunity presented by his son, Dodi.
It is a remarkable trajectory which involved much self-invention and paranoia, double-dealing and boasting. He hired helicopters and Rolls-Royces to impress, described his father as a 'pasha', and dished out paste diamonds to his girlfriends. One of his lines was: 'I built Dubai, you know. Dubai's wealth is all due to Mohamed Fayed.' He was so preposterous and his manners so coarse that few noticed his guile and demonic drive. He snatched Harrods from the grasp of Tiny Rowland, no mean feat, considering Tiny's cunning - and deceived practically everyone who had been given the responsibility to investigate the origins of his wealth. Few bothered to question his assertions about Dubai, or to investigate his less-advertised links with the Sultan of Brunei, because they were more alarmed at the idea that Tiny Rowland would own Harrods if Fayed did not get it.
So Fayed was sitting next to Carol Thatcher at a dinner, and very soon after that Norman Tebbit announced that there would be no inquiry into Fayed's acquisition of the store. 'Fayed was the victor,' writes Bower, 'he was no longer the commission agent, a middleman, a servant and a groveller to kings and sheihks. He was the principal, who had the power to say 'I don't need that person'. '
As Bower observes, the singular nature of Harrods itself is central to the Fayed story. 'No other store offered the certainty of meeting the famous,' he writes. 'The world of Harrods was not only a place of work, but also the hub of social life. Friendships and marriages were forged in the shop.' Fayed would not have comprehended this concept of his purchase. He believed that he had captured a citadel of the British establishment, and it is clear that he also saw Harrods as his personal kingdom, where the employees were his subjects.
His private army of ex-SAS soldiers increased to match his status. They wore fatigues on duty at his home in Oxted, Surrey and stood to attention when he entered the room. Bower reveals that Fayed's guards were issued with Walther PPK handguns, and, in the country home there was a locker which contained pump-action shotguns, semi-automatics, revolvers and a 32mm machine gun, from the Middle East.
As with senior employees at Harrods, the guards' lives were made more tolerable by handouts of £50 notes. For these, they were expected to keep their mouths shut and carry out Fayed's bizarre orders unquestioningly. On election day in 1992, Fayed told a former SAS trooper, John Evans, to shoot his ginger tomcat, on the grounds that it was dirty. (Fayed has a famous dread of germs.) Evans, a veteran of Ulster who has the Military Medal, shot the wrong cat. Bower wrote: 'Hearing the news from the housekeeper, Fayed exploded: 'Fuggin' nothing is fugging done properly'. ' Evans was then required to ambush the right cat, but the cat escaped into the house with a bleeding head.
During our battle with Fayed, we gained extraordinary glimpses of his set-up at Oxted. One came from a woman named Pip Dumbill, a temporary nanny to Fayed's three children. All we knew was that she was called Pip and came from Australia or New Zealand. After five months of search and some luck, we located her in the Himalayas. A fax was posted on the outside of a hut which housed the local communications centre. Five minutes later, Pip Dumbill happened to pass the hut, saw the Vanity Fair notepaper flapping in the wind and called us.
She told us how she was sitting in her room at Oxted one weekend evening when the internal phone rang. It was Fayed, suggesting that they have a drink. She agreed hesitantly and asked where she should go. He told her not to leave her room until he arrived, which he did a few minutes later, in his dressing-gown.
Then he took her by the hand and led her a convoluted route through the darkened house because, as he explained, he did not want to be spotted by his security cameras. Once in his bedroom suite, he made a pass, offering her £100 to sleep with him, which she declined.
Fayed's lunge for Pip Dumbill was not one-off. It was part of a pattern. He would select his target and insist that she have a medical examination, which included an Aids test. Once the woman had been cleared by a Harley Street doctor, he would make the pass. This was preceded by his original chat-up lines - 'How's your pussy?' and 'Did you have a good fug over the weekend?' Another female employee came to our notice after she had successfully sued Fayed for wrongful dismissal. Fayed had persuaded Hermina da Silva to join him in his bedroom, where he attempted to seduce her with kisses and fondles. Da Silva rejected his advances and later gave in her notice, saying that she had been forced to leave by his behaviour.
It was at this stage that John Macnamara, an ex-policeman who now runs all Fayed's security operations was brought in to deal with the threat she posed. He made false allegations of theft against da Silva, as a result of which she was arrested. She was released without charge and, showing considerable courage, pursued her case, eventually receiving compensation of £12,000.
We were constantly struck by the way Fayed's senior personnel appeared in some cases to be immune from the law. No charges or official investigation followed the da Silva incident, nor the discovery of crack cocaine equipment in a bag containing Salah Fayed's passport.
Salah, one of Mohamed's younger brothers was travelling to Scotland with his personal assistant, a young woman named Rachel Crowe. During the journey, they left the bag in a cab. The driver handed it in to the police, who found equipment for smoking crack cocaine. When Mohamed Fayed heard about the arrest he said: 'Tell the police that the bag belonged to the girl.' His considerable influence was brought to bear on the Scottish police and the incident was hushed up.
We traced Rachel Crowe to southwest London. Although she had long since left the Fayeds' employment and was now working as an air hostess, she would not speak about the incident. I remember her standing in the doorway shivering, her eyes simultaneously betraying anxiety and rapid calculation. 'Please,' she said, 'never, never contact me again. Please!'
The fear that Fayed's people inspired in potential witnesses was striking. David Hooper's team never pushed them, for the memories were sometimes painful. I remember one interview with a woman whom I shall call Candida. After about 20 minutes, her considerable poise disappeared with a sudden convulsion of self-loathing. 'You have to understand,' she said. 'I simply cannot bear for people to know what happened to me. It is my lifelong shame.'
We knew that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg, much of which has now been revealed by Tom Bower's inquiries. As I read his narrative and recall our evidence, I found myself amazed that Mohamed Fayed has got away with so much for so long. The harassment alone makes Bill ******* look like a hesitant teenager. Then there are the huge surveillance operations, the racism and persecution of employees who have left Harrods.
You no longer wonder why there was doubt about Fayed's application to become a British citizen. Indeed, you wonder why the man is not facing several official investigations. Part of his success has been to persuade the British that doubts about his ownership of Harrods were entirely motivated by our racism. Fayed has always depicted himself as the outsider, the simple man of honour and enterprise who had been rebuffed by the British establishment because he was an Arab. This line, repeated over the years by his spokesman Michael Cole, has served him rather well. He has been given the benefit of many doubts because he is an Arab. This ploy is richly ironic when you learn about the institutionalised racism at Harrods.
There was the case of Sandra Lewis-Glass; Vanity Fair contacted her after her appearance at an industrial tribunal. Lewis-Glass was employed to handle the short-term letting of flats at Fayed's Hyde Park residence - numbers 55 and 60 Park Lane. One of her less appealing duties was to ensure that no blacks occupied the flats in 60 Park Lane, where Fayed lived. It was not easy for Lewis-Glass. Her own father is black.
Eventually, she fell foul of Fayed when he began to suspect her of betraying him to Westminster City Council, which had learned that Fayed's company was reporting the lets as long leases to avoid paying higher business rates on short tenancies. Lewis-Glass was fired and on the same day was followed by an undercover surveillance team, reporting to John Macnamara. At a restaurant, the team secretly recorded her saying that she wished she had not left vital computer discs, which would prove the deception over short-term lets in her office. Within a few days, Lewis-Glass was arrested on suspicion of stealing two floppy discs worth 80p each. She was held for nearly 20 hours, before being released without charge.
Fayed's ability to influence events and threaten former employees extends well beyond Harrods. As Bower remarks, Fayed could not only buy MPs, he could also, through Macnamara, launch police investigations.
Occasionally, Macnamara's undercover operations reached to Europe and the Middle East, most sensationally in the case of Christoph Bettermann, a former managing director of Harrods. In 1991, Macnamara informed Fayed that Betterman, previously a marine salvage expert, had been talking to a headhunter. He knew this because he had bugged Bettermann's private line.
When confronted by Fayed, Bettermann guessed what had happened and resigned, at which point Fayed threatened him: 'If you stay with me, I'll make you rich; but if you leave me, I'll destroy you.' Bettermann ignored the warning and left. Eight months later, in 1992, Bettermann was arrested in Dubai on charges of embezzling $900,000. Behind this was an outrageous letter from Fayed to the Crown Prince of Sharjah, which alleged that Bettermann had embezzled millions of dollars. There was also a tape recording made - and, it is believed, doctored - by Macnamara, which suggested that Bettermann had admitted the fraud.
'Sitting in a cage among common criminals for the first of 24 court hearings,' writes Bower, 'Bettermann was presented with the transcript of his conversation with Macnamara in Spain. Naively, he had accepted Macnamara's word that he was not being secretly recorded.' All charges were subsequently dropped in Dubai, but it was a clear lesson for anyone who worked at Harrods.
If this was the way a former managing director was treated by Fayed, what would he do to a floor manager or sales assistant who crossed him? All the old spirit of Harrods had gone. Now people watched what they said on the phone and reminded themselves that every corner of the store was covered by closed-circuit TV cameras. They could not even be sure of their colleagues, for there was a network of informers reporting to Fayed's office.
Bettermann returned to Britain to sue Fayed for libel contained in that letter to the Crown Prince. On the morning of the trial, Fayed's lawyers failed to turn up to contest the case. Bettermann received maximum damages and costs, but he was never compensated for the time he spent in jail, and was robbed of a much-needed public apology.
It is worrying that Fayed possesses powers of intimidation and extremely troubling to know that nothing has been done to investigate links between Macnamara and certain police stations in London and the home counties.
Perhaps the publication of Bower's account will prompt such an investigation.
But for the moment there is an interesting lesson from the experiences of da Silva, Lewis-Glass, Jones and Bettermann about Fayed's personality. He has an elemental vindictiveness. It is the characteristic responsible for his feud against Tiny Rowland. It also inspired him to turn on the Conservative Party in the cash-for-questions and Jonathan Aitken scandals. The British public has benefited from his desire for revenge, but we should remind ourselves that Fayed was part of an extremely questionable transaction. If he had gained all that he wanted from Ian Greer, Neil Hamilton, Tim Smith and Sir Michael Grylls, then we would never have heard of those sleaze allegations.
However, it is worth noting that despite revelations about Fayed's dishonesty, no serious doubt has been raised over the allegations made against Hamilton and other MPs. After investigating Fayed's life for almost a year, Bower has declared himself satisfied that Hamilton and Smith did accept cash in exchange for parliamentary questions.
It is impossible to ignore the evidence in Bower's book. At the least, Fayed emerges as an extremely nasty piece of work who has traded on a caricature of victimhood, while causing misery among his employees and those he set out to woo to advance his status in Britain. Bower establishes the lies, the harassment, the bugging of phone conversations and the vilification in Fayed's Knightsbridge fiefdom.
Fayed's story has not ended. The Parisian authorities have yet to report on the crash in which Diana and Dodi died. And next week Fayed is due to defend himself in a civil case brought by the widow of Tiny Rowland. Things do not look good for him. As Bower concludes: 'Like so many autocrats, Fayed has become his own worst enemy. The inevitable consequence will be the collapse of his empire.'
Great read! So nice to know there are really smart writers/journalists who are not taken for a fool.
The news tonight said Harrods was negotiating a settlement and I wondered why Harrods and not the family, but having read this thread, I now understand.
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I despair, so ugly and wrong 😞
With the crimes of this depraved man and his protectors finally being brought out into the open I hope that all of the women concerned can recover more fully and at least get some small compensation for injuries suffered. Utterly shameful
www.telegraph.co.uk
I always enjoyed The Crown – even if the royal drama’s sheen of class disguised that it belonged to the higher cobblers – but the final season left me with a feeling of disgust. It painted Mohamed Fayed (the ‘Al-’ before his surname was an affectation, like so much about that Egyptian guttersnipe turned Phoney Pharoah) as an amusing figure. In their depiction, he was a tetchy mogul and fond but pushy father who encouraged the romance between his son Dodi and the Princess of Wales, and won public sympathy when the pair perished in a car crash.
Fayed had actually tipped off photographers that Dodi and Diana were at his Ritz hotel in Paris. It was a marvellous piece of publicity for a contrived “fairytale romance”, which he hoped would lead to his son marrying the mother of the future King and which, ultimately, led to the pair’s fatal pursuit by paparazzi. Far from being an entertaining bit-part player, Fayed was lucky to avoid blame for Diana’s tragic death.
After the Princess died, he continued to exploit her in the most repulsive manner. He went so far as to suggest that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s baby and that Prince Philip colluded with MI6 to have her bumped off because no child with Arab blood could be allowed to pollute the Royal family.
There was nothing funny about Mohamed Fayed. He was a proper, old-fashioned monster, a Mafia-style boss who used a combination of money and fear to silence anyone who dared accuse him of wrong-doing. The affectionate, pantomime Netflix portrayal was just one more depressing instance of the disgusting old fraud being let off the hook.
During the late 1990s, a couple of women who had worked for “Mohamed” contacted me with hair-raising stories about his abuse of female staff, his appalling racism and the constant stream of young blondes who came through the doors of 60 Park Lane, his London base. Back in the early eighties, long before Fayed bought Harrods, his then PA and air stewardess, Penelope Simpson, told me that Friday nights were always “play night”. Fayed would get a call at the same time each week from a phonebox and a woman would make arrangements to drop off a young girl who would be paid in cash. “The teenage girls were clearly coming from a private school,” Simpson recalled. Fayed did like his victims to be well-spoken.
When a BBC documentary revealed last week that five women who worked at Harrods claim they were raped by Fayed, it was hardly the nasty surprise the media chose to pretend that it was. The only shocking thing is that, like Jimmy Savile, Fayed was allowed to go to his grave, aged 94, without paying for his crimes.
So you might ask why I, and countless other journalists, failed to expose him when there were women prepared to tell their stories 25 years ago.
Welcome to two-tier British justice; for the few, not the many. Libel actions in this country are potentially so expensive that you need deep pockets to defend one. A sales assistant at Harrods could blow her lifetime earnings on a week in court. Fayed calculated he could molest and rape such people with impunity. He was right.
Fayed in Harrods in 2005 next to a memorial to his son Dodi and Diana Princess of Wales Reuters
Of course, the women could always go to the papers, but the media will hesitate to run stories about rich, influential people who can afford the best barristers unless the evidence appears to be cast-iron. And victims are likely to be scared and easily intimidated. David Hooper, a veteran libel lawyer who first investigated Fayed’s alleged sexual offending in the 1990s, claims that Fayed was the head of a “deeply criminal organisation” who relied on a “team of enablers”, including former police officers, as well as aggressive legal tactics to silence victims.
Like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, to whom Penny Simpson compares him, Fayed would shower the powerful and famous with gifts and freebies; favours he could call in at any time. There were 30 flats at 60 Park Lane and many household names enjoyed his hospitality. (There will be plenty of rock stars, Hollywood actors, minor royals and politicians feeling nervous and uncomfortable today. I know some of their names.) “In quiet periods,” Simpson recalls, “my job was compiling a Rolodex the size of a small Ferris wheel. Many different hands had filled out its thousands of index cards. Mohamed would deposit scraps of paper on my desk with scrawled titbits; ‘younger wife,’ or ‘vintage Patek Philippe, check family’, or the sinister one word ‘Debt.’ An elaborate spider’s web for me to cross-reference, information constantly updated yet never discarded.”
Although Fayed tried it on with Penny a few times, she firmly rebuffed him. What saved her from being raped, she thinks, is that his female employees usually travelled in pairs for safety and it wasn’t worth Fayed’s while to cause trouble in his own back office. Members of staff were spoiled to keep them sweet while living under constant threat. “Mohamed’s largesse was unpredictable, and designed to encourage dependency,” recalls Penny.
“Salary increases were never formalised, rather they appeared as small wads of cash, often in the ubiquitous brown envelopes. He liked to distribute gifts of jewellery – sometimes valuable, often not. He knew we were unfamiliar with real gemstones and enjoyed our confusion. “You have that butterfly watch I gave you?” he’d ask out of nowhere. “The jewels are good, yes?””
To work in Fayed’s office was to exist in a gilded cage, to have all your needs (from medical appointments to posh underwear) paid for. But it was on the understanding that your loyalty was absolute. When Fayed first interviewed her, Penny Simpson recalls him boasting that no one who worked for him had ever been required to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). “He made himself pretty clear. No staff had to sign an NDA because they knew there would be frightening consequences if they said anything. He had some seriously nasty friends. And the climate was very different back then. A woman alleging sexual assault would not have been believed.”
The only journalists with the guts and guile to try and expose the brute were Henry Porter (for Vanity Fair) and Tom Bower. In 1998, in “Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography”, Bower, a brilliant sleuth, disclosed how Fayed’s “enforcers” would shut down allegations about the boss. “By far the most intriguing was the security chief, John MacNamara,” wrote Bower, “A former detective chief superintendent and head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad, Macnamara [who died in 2019 aged 83] had overseen countless dishonest operations around the world as he sought to protect his employer and destroy his enemies.”
Macnamara, “a master in blackmail, falsification, intrusion and corruption, not to mention threats of violence”, took care of the rough stuff. Fayed also had a director of public affairs, Michael Cole, to burnish his public persona. Smoothie-chops Cole, he of the luxuriant bouffant hair and impeccable manners, was as well-spoken as any of the women Fayed allegedly raped. He traded on his career as the BBC’s former royal correspondent, which lent lustre to his grubby little master. When Fayed died last August, Cole, now 81 and retired to a converted barn in Suffolk, was given ample airtime to pay touching tribute. Fayed was “fascinating, larger than life, full of great humanity”, Cole told Radio 4’s Today programme. I nearly choked on my Bran Flakes.
What on earth were the BBC (and most other media outlets) doing allowing such nauseating encomiums to such a despicable charlatan? The only caveat Cole – hair now snowy but still abundant – could bring himself to utter was “highly controversial”. Ah, yes, Michael, the “highly controversial” alleged serial sex abuser and rapist you served so devotedly. What suckers we are for “larger than life” characters like Fayed and Savile who hide their darkness beneath a buffoonish persona.
Following the BBC documentary, Cole’s wife, Jane, said the revelations had “come as a shock” to them. For once, Fayed’s mouthpiece had no honeyed words to smooth over his late master’s amorality. Cat got your tongue, Michael?
Suddenly, after decades of cover-up and institutional indifference, Fayed’s alleged victims are now seeking compensation from Harrods (Fayed sold it for £1.5 billion in 2010 to the Qatar Investment Authority). The Knightsbridge store says it is investigating whether any of the current staff were involved in the alleged abuse.
Is that it? With the greatest sympathy and respect to the women concerned, this is a much bigger issue than whether someone in the Harrods personnel department quietly sacked and paid off a perfumery assistant who was making claims about the proprietor. Grateful to avoid a spotlight on their own shortcomings, the media and legal establishment are focusing on the “timeline of Harrods’ sexual predator”.
Where is the pressure on the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who somehow managed to avoid getting Fayed prosecuted when even a mere newspaper columnist like me had credible witnesses a quarter of a century ago, who were offering me details of his grotesque misconduct?
The facts are damning. Fayed was investigated by police three times yet was never prosecuted.
In 2008, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in the Harrods boardroom. The CPS said there was not enough evidence to prosecute, citing “conflicting evidence”.
In 2015, Metropolitan police investigated him following allegations he had raped a woman in 2013. Once again, the CPS reviewed the files and there was no prosecution.
In 2018, multiple women came forward to tell their stories to the police. That time, a file didn’t even get as far as the CPS.
While the CPS did review both their Fayed files, a spokesperson said: “To bring a prosecution, the CPS must be confident there is a realistic prospect of conviction – in each instance, our prosecutors looked carefully at the evidence and concluded this wasn’t the case.”
Why might that be? What could account for the curious inability of Scotland Yard’s finest to track down a few Penelope Simpsons to testify against a billionaire with royal connections? Hmmm. Might a few hampers with the famous Harrods livery have arrived on certain doorsteps, or even the little brown envelopes Fayed used to silence staff? Did John Macnamara still have any sway over colleagues in the police force where he worked for 28 years and for which he had been head of – cue hollow laughter – the fraud squad? Heaven forbid.
Meanwhile, the CPS – whose then-director of public prosecutions was an upstanding fellow by the name of Keir Starmer – was building up form when it came to discounting the claims of working-class women. In 2009, the CPS took the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile on the grounds of our old friend “insufficient evidence”. In reality, one of our most proudly prolific child sex offenders had assaulted so many young people that it would have been quite a stretch for Plod not to find one or two in the entire country who could have landed Jim’ll Fix It in court. Who knows, perhaps the BBC star pervert’s day job as “national treasure” and mate of Prince Charles proved alibi enough?
An inquiry into this wretched failure by the police and the CPS did not suggest that Keir Starmer was personally involved in the decisions made about Savile, although some might wonder why the head of the service was not told about such a high-profile case. The CPS says that records relating to the decision not to charge Savile were not kept, which was “in line with its data retention policy”. A marvellous excuse, you must admit, and so many of them!
Both Savile and Fayed were allowed to take their guilty secrets to the grave thanks to a cowardly, colluding establishment. How many public figures ensnared in the Rolodex spider’s web kept in Fayed’s office as an insurance policy might have been embarrassed by his conviction, I wonder? Hard not to conclude it was simply easier to look the other way.
Had either man ever been brought to trial, no doubt they would have had their peccadillos explained away by the best senior counsel money can buy; counsel like Huw Edwards’ defence team. They claimed that, among other traumas, the former presenter’s distress over not getting into Oxford (poor chap had to settle for Cardiff University) had led to such lifelong feelings of inadequacy that he had to look at the worst imaginable images of child sexual abuse to make himself feel better.
The depraved BBC anchor paid tens of thousands for nude pictures from a Welsh boy younger than his own sons (“Ach-y-fi!” as Huw’s Welsh mother and mine would cry in horror) was let off without a jail sentence. This tells us all we need to know about where raped children and preyed-upon shop assistants come in the hierarchy of British justice. Look how the people who do pluck up courage are treated.
More than a hundred women have now come forward making allegations of abuse against the Egyptian tycoon. Gemma, who was allegedly raped by Fayed in 2009, says she provided audio tapes of his vile conduct, but lawyers shredded her evidence in front of a senior Harrods HR official. Rightly, victims are calling for an inquiry that scrutinises not only Fayed’s behaviour, but those who appear to have enabled him. The Metropolitan Police and the CPS, which absurdly struggled to establish a “realistic prospect of conviction”, must themselves be suspects.
From her two years as Fayed’s PA, Penelope Simpson says what she remembers most is “the constant battle we waged against germs. The incessant washing and drying of crockery and glasses with tissues (as tea towels were forbidden). We travelled with crates of Kleenex and wet wipes with which we would swab door handles and lavatory levers and lift buttons. Room service was always re-plated on dishes we had personally sanitised, and table tops and chair arms disinfected after each guest departed.” Fayed had prospective victims tested for sexual and other diseases (he was particularly worried about TB).
How telling that the dirty old man should be obsessed with cleanliness for himself.
If there was any fairness, Mohamed Fayed would have been disgraced during his lifetime, not after death. I hope that he, Savile and Jeffrey Epstein are in an especially toasty corner of Hell (They’re keeping a seat warm for Harvey Weinstein). But please let’s not pretend that the stories about Fayed’s alleged rapes and abuse of young women “defy belief”, as people now conveniently claim. Given a system that privileges the rich and the ruthless over ordinary women and children, such claims are all too believable.
With the crimes of this depraved man and his protectors finally being brought out into the open I hope that all of the women concerned can recover more fully and at least get some small compensation for injuries suffered. Utterly shameful
I knew about Fayed’s sex abuse but was silenced by a system that protects the rich
The same laws that saved Jimmy Savile from jail allowed Mohamed Fayed to escape justice
www.telegraph.co.uk
I always enjoyed The Crown – even if the royal drama’s sheen of class disguised that it belonged to the higher cobblers – but the final season left me with a feeling of disgust. It painted Mohamed Fayed (the ‘Al-’ before his surname was an affectation, like so much about that Egyptian guttersnipe turned Phoney Pharoah) as an amusing figure. In their depiction, he was a tetchy mogul and fond but pushy father who encouraged the romance between his son Dodi and the Princess of Wales, and won public sympathy when the pair perished in a car crash.
Fayed had actually tipped off photographers that Dodi and Diana were at his Ritz hotel in Paris. It was a marvellous piece of publicity for a contrived “fairytale romance”, which he hoped would lead to his son marrying the mother of the future King and which, ultimately, led to the pair’s fatal pursuit by paparazzi. Far from being an entertaining bit-part player, Fayed was lucky to avoid blame for Diana’s tragic death.
After the Princess died, he continued to exploit her in the most repulsive manner. He went so far as to suggest that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s baby and that Prince Philip colluded with MI6 to have her bumped off because no child with Arab blood could be allowed to pollute the Royal family.
There was nothing funny about Mohamed Fayed. He was a proper, old-fashioned monster, a Mafia-style boss who used a combination of money and fear to silence anyone who dared accuse him of wrong-doing. The affectionate, pantomime Netflix portrayal was just one more depressing instance of the disgusting old fraud being let off the hook.
During the late 1990s, a couple of women who had worked for “Mohamed” contacted me with hair-raising stories about his abuse of female staff, his appalling racism and the constant stream of young blondes who came through the doors of 60 Park Lane, his London base. Back in the early eighties, long before Fayed bought Harrods, his then PA and air stewardess, Penelope Simpson, told me that Friday nights were always “play night”. Fayed would get a call at the same time each week from a phonebox and a woman would make arrangements to drop off a young girl who would be paid in cash. “The teenage girls were clearly coming from a private school,” Simpson recalled. Fayed did like his victims to be well-spoken.
When a BBC documentary revealed last week that five women who worked at Harrods claim they were raped by Fayed, it was hardly the nasty surprise the media chose to pretend that it was. The only shocking thing is that, like Jimmy Savile, Fayed was allowed to go to his grave, aged 94, without paying for his crimes.
So you might ask why I, and countless other journalists, failed to expose him when there were women prepared to tell their stories 25 years ago.
Welcome to two-tier British justice; for the few, not the many. Libel actions in this country are potentially so expensive that you need deep pockets to defend one. A sales assistant at Harrods could blow her lifetime earnings on a week in court. Fayed calculated he could molest and rape such people with impunity. He was right.
Fayed in Harrods in 2005 next to a memorial to his son Dodi and Diana Princess of Wales Reuters
Of course, the women could always go to the papers, but the media will hesitate to run stories about rich, influential people who can afford the best barristers unless the evidence appears to be cast-iron. And victims are likely to be scared and easily intimidated. David Hooper, a veteran libel lawyer who first investigated Fayed’s alleged sexual offending in the 1990s, claims that Fayed was the head of a “deeply criminal organisation” who relied on a “team of enablers”, including former police officers, as well as aggressive legal tactics to silence victims.
Like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, to whom Penny Simpson compares him, Fayed would shower the powerful and famous with gifts and freebies; favours he could call in at any time. There were 30 flats at 60 Park Lane and many household names enjoyed his hospitality. (There will be plenty of rock stars, Hollywood actors, minor royals and politicians feeling nervous and uncomfortable today. I know some of their names.) “In quiet periods,” Simpson recalls, “my job was compiling a Rolodex the size of a small Ferris wheel. Many different hands had filled out its thousands of index cards. Mohamed would deposit scraps of paper on my desk with scrawled titbits; ‘younger wife,’ or ‘vintage Patek Philippe, check family’, or the sinister one word ‘Debt.’ An elaborate spider’s web for me to cross-reference, information constantly updated yet never discarded.”
Although Fayed tried it on with Penny a few times, she firmly rebuffed him. What saved her from being raped, she thinks, is that his female employees usually travelled in pairs for safety and it wasn’t worth Fayed’s while to cause trouble in his own back office. Members of staff were spoiled to keep them sweet while living under constant threat. “Mohamed’s largesse was unpredictable, and designed to encourage dependency,” recalls Penny.
“Salary increases were never formalised, rather they appeared as small wads of cash, often in the ubiquitous brown envelopes. He liked to distribute gifts of jewellery – sometimes valuable, often not. He knew we were unfamiliar with real gemstones and enjoyed our confusion. “You have that butterfly watch I gave you?” he’d ask out of nowhere. “The jewels are good, yes?””
To work in Fayed’s office was to exist in a gilded cage, to have all your needs (from medical appointments to posh underwear) paid for. But it was on the understanding that your loyalty was absolute. When Fayed first interviewed her, Penny Simpson recalls him boasting that no one who worked for him had ever been required to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). “He made himself pretty clear. No staff had to sign an NDA because they knew there would be frightening consequences if they said anything. He had some seriously nasty friends. And the climate was very different back then. A woman alleging sexual assault would not have been believed.”
The only journalists with the guts and guile to try and expose the brute were Henry Porter (for Vanity Fair) and Tom Bower. In 1998, in “Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography”, Bower, a brilliant sleuth, disclosed how Fayed’s “enforcers” would shut down allegations about the boss. “By far the most intriguing was the security chief, John MacNamara,” wrote Bower, “A former detective chief superintendent and head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad, Macnamara [who died in 2019 aged 83] had overseen countless dishonest operations around the world as he sought to protect his employer and destroy his enemies.”
Macnamara, “a master in blackmail, falsification, intrusion and corruption, not to mention threats of violence”, took care of the rough stuff. Fayed also had a director of public affairs, Michael Cole, to burnish his public persona. Smoothie-chops Cole, he of the luxuriant bouffant hair and impeccable manners, was as well-spoken as any of the women Fayed allegedly raped. He traded on his career as the BBC’s former royal correspondent, which lent lustre to his grubby little master. When Fayed died last August, Cole, now 81 and retired to a converted barn in Suffolk, was given ample airtime to pay touching tribute. Fayed was “fascinating, larger than life, full of great humanity”, Cole told Radio 4’s Today programme. I nearly choked on my Bran Flakes.
What on earth were the BBC (and most other media outlets) doing allowing such nauseating encomiums to such a despicable charlatan? The only caveat Cole – hair now snowy but still abundant – could bring himself to utter was “highly controversial”. Ah, yes, Michael, the “highly controversial” alleged serial sex abuser and rapist you served so devotedly. What suckers we are for “larger than life” characters like Fayed and Savile who hide their darkness beneath a buffoonish persona.
Following the BBC documentary, Cole’s wife, Jane, said the revelations had “come as a shock” to them. For once, Fayed’s mouthpiece had no honeyed words to smooth over his late master’s amorality. Cat got your tongue, Michael?
Suddenly, after decades of cover-up and institutional indifference, Fayed’s alleged victims are now seeking compensation from Harrods (Fayed sold it for £1.5 billion in 2010 to the Qatar Investment Authority). The Knightsbridge store says it is investigating whether any of the current staff were involved in the alleged abuse.
Is that it? With the greatest sympathy and respect to the women concerned, this is a much bigger issue than whether someone in the Harrods personnel department quietly sacked and paid off a perfumery assistant who was making claims about the proprietor. Grateful to avoid a spotlight on their own shortcomings, the media and legal establishment are focusing on the “timeline of Harrods’ sexual predator”.
Where is the pressure on the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who somehow managed to avoid getting Fayed prosecuted when even a mere newspaper columnist like me had credible witnesses a quarter of a century ago, who were offering me details of his grotesque misconduct?
The facts are damning. Fayed was investigated by police three times yet was never prosecuted.
In 2008, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in the Harrods boardroom. The CPS said there was not enough evidence to prosecute, citing “conflicting evidence”.
In 2015, Metropolitan police investigated him following allegations he had raped a woman in 2013. Once again, the CPS reviewed the files and there was no prosecution.
In 2018, multiple women came forward to tell their stories to the police. That time, a file didn’t even get as far as the CPS.
While the CPS did review both their Fayed files, a spokesperson said: “To bring a prosecution, the CPS must be confident there is a realistic prospect of conviction – in each instance, our prosecutors looked carefully at the evidence and concluded this wasn’t the case.”
Why might that be? What could account for the curious inability of Scotland Yard’s finest to track down a few Penelope Simpsons to testify against a billionaire with royal connections? Hmmm. Might a few hampers with the famous Harrods livery have arrived on certain doorsteps, or even the little brown envelopes Fayed used to silence staff? Did John Macnamara still have any sway over colleagues in the police force where he worked for 28 years and for which he had been head of – cue hollow laughter – the fraud squad? Heaven forbid.
Meanwhile, the CPS – whose then-director of public prosecutions was an upstanding fellow by the name of Keir Starmer – was building up form when it came to discounting the claims of working-class women. In 2009, the CPS took the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile on the grounds of our old friend “insufficient evidence”. In reality, one of our most proudly prolific child sex offenders had assaulted so many young people that it would have been quite a stretch for Plod not to find one or two in the entire country who could have landed Jim’ll Fix It in court. Who knows, perhaps the BBC star pervert’s day job as “national treasure” and mate of Prince Charles proved alibi enough?
An inquiry into this wretched failure by the police and the CPS did not suggest that Keir Starmer was personally involved in the decisions made about Savile, although some might wonder why the head of the service was not told about such a high-profile case. The CPS says that records relating to the decision not to charge Savile were not kept, which was “in line with its data retention policy”. A marvellous excuse, you must admit, and so many of them!
Both Savile and Fayed were allowed to take their guilty secrets to the grave thanks to a cowardly, colluding establishment. How many public figures ensnared in the Rolodex spider’s web kept in Fayed’s office as an insurance policy might have been embarrassed by his conviction, I wonder? Hard not to conclude it was simply easier to look the other way.
Had either man ever been brought to trial, no doubt they would have had their peccadillos explained away by the best senior counsel money can buy; counsel like Huw Edwards’ defence team. They claimed that, among other traumas, the former presenter’s distress over not getting into Oxford (poor chap had to settle for Cardiff University) had led to such lifelong feelings of inadequacy that he had to look at the worst imaginable images of child sexual abuse to make himself feel better.
The depraved BBC anchor paid tens of thousands for nude pictures from a Welsh boy younger than his own sons (“Ach-y-fi!” as Huw’s Welsh mother and mine would cry in horror) was let off without a jail sentence. This tells us all we need to know about where raped children and preyed-upon shop assistants come in the hierarchy of British justice. Look how the people who do pluck up courage are treated.
More than a hundred women have now come forward making allegations of abuse against the Egyptian tycoon. Gemma, who was allegedly raped by Fayed in 2009, says she provided audio tapes of his vile conduct, but lawyers shredded her evidence in front of a senior Harrods HR official. Rightly, victims are calling for an inquiry that scrutinises not only Fayed’s behaviour, but those who appear to have enabled him. The Metropolitan Police and the CPS, which absurdly struggled to establish a “realistic prospect of conviction”, must themselves be suspects.
From her two years as Fayed’s PA, Penelope Simpson says what she remembers most is “the constant battle we waged against germs. The incessant washing and drying of crockery and glasses with tissues (as tea towels were forbidden). We travelled with crates of Kleenex and wet wipes with which we would swab door handles and lavatory levers and lift buttons. Room service was always re-plated on dishes we had personally sanitised, and table tops and chair arms disinfected after each guest departed.” Fayed had prospective victims tested for sexual and other diseases (he was particularly worried about TB).
How telling that the dirty old man should be obsessed with cleanliness for himself.
If there was any fairness, Mohamed Fayed would have been disgraced during his lifetime, not after death. I hope that he, Savile and Jeffrey Epstein are in an especially toasty corner of Hell (They’re keeping a seat warm for Harvey Weinstein). But please let’s not pretend that the stories about Fayed’s alleged rapes and abuse of young women “defy belief”, as people now conveniently claim. Given a system that privileges the rich and the ruthless over ordinary women and children, such claims are all too believable.