Thirteen women have accused Mohamed Al Fayed, the father of Princess Diana’s boyfriend, of sexual assault.
A year after Mohamad Al Fayed’s death in August 2023, 13 women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault. Al Fayed, an Egyptian tycoon, owned the British department store Harrods from 1985 to 2010. He was also the father of Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s boyfriend who died with her in a car crash in 1997. Following their deaths, Mohamad Al Fayed erected a public memorial inside Harrods and pushed for further investigations into the deaths.
In a new documentary, Al Fayed: The Predator at Harrods, The BBC is publishing interviews with women who say they were assaulted by Al Fayed while they worked at the company.
“Any workplace has a duty to ensure the safety of its employees. There is no doubt that the company failed in its duty to these women,” Bruce Drummond, “The web of corruption and abuse within this company is unbelievable and very dark,” a lawyer representing some of the victims told the documentary.
IN a public statementHarrods said it had resolved complaints against Al Fayed “as quickly as possible” since learning of the allegations against him in 2023, noting that the resolution process “remains available” to any current or former employees. “We are deeply appalled by the allegations of abuse made by Mohamed Al Fayed,” the statement continued. “These are the actions of an individual intent on abusing his power wherever he operates and we condemn them in the strongest terms. We also acknowledge that during this time as a business we failed in our responsibilities to our employees who were victimised by him and for this we sincerely apologise.”
Of the 13 women the BBC spoke to, four said Al Fayed raped them, and all said they felt intimidated by a culture of fear at Harrods. One woman who spoke to the news agency said she went to the police with an allegation of rape in 2008 when she was 15, but no charges were ever laid. Some of the accusers said they believed their phones had been tapped. In an interview for the documentary, a former deputy head of security at Harrods, Eamon Coyle, said part of his job was to listen to recorded phone calls from employees.
Al Fayed is the central character in the final season of Crown, that describes his fascination with the royal family. In the 1980s, Al Fayed took over the lease on the Paris house that had belonged to King Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson, after Edward abdicated. In 2004, Vanity Fair Al Fayed reportedly hired private investigators and spent millions of dollars trying to prove that the deaths of Diana and his son were the result of murder, and appealed a French court ruling that the crash was an accident.
