“It’s like we have been in a plane crash 25 years apart but all somehow together,” says Lindsay Mason of the women who have united to tell their experiences of Mohamed Al Fayed. “There’s an incredible camaraderie.”
Al Fayed, who owned the London department store Harrods between 1985 and 2010, died last year aged 94. Following a BBC documentary, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods, scores of women have come forward with allegations including sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape. Many of the women allege that they were forced to undergo highly invasive medical checks before working for Al Fayed, who then humiliated and abused them, using security cameras to keep tabs on them and threatening them if they tried to speak out.
A vast operation around Al Fayed — from security staff and lawyers to Harrods colleagues — enabled his predatory behavior: some by turning a blind eye but others by delivering victims to him or preventing their voices from being heard.
The BBC documentary was not the first time that allegations had surfaced. In 1995 a number of women spoke to Vanity Fair alleging sexual misconduct; Al Fayed sued the magazine but dropped his libel claim after the deaths of his eldest son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. Both a 1998 biography of Al Fayed by Tom Bower and a 2017 Dispatches documentary by Channel 4 also featured allegations of sexual assault.
The police have since revealed that they received allegations relating to 21 women about Al Fayed between 2005 and 2023; a further 40 alleged victims have now contacted the Met. But his alleged behavior wasn’t a secret: it was front-page news in 2008, when he was questioned under caution after a 15-year-old girl said he had sexually assaulted her in the Harrods boardroom (the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case, concluding there was no realistic prospect of a conviction).
Yet Al Fayed was still indulged as an eccentric billionaire: he appeared on the TV shows TFI Friday in 1999 and Da Ali G Show in 2000. The Netflix series The Crown portrayed him as avuncular in 2022, even naming an episode in its fifth series Mou Mou — his nickname. At Harrods, which he sold to Qatar Holding for a reported $2.2 billion in 2010, his face still appears on a pharaoh statue in the Egyptian corridor.
The current owners say that they are “utterly appalled” by the allegations and apologized that his victims were failed. Harrods has opened a compensation scheme and says: “Since 2023 Harrods settled a number of claims with women who alleged historic sexual misconduct by Fayed. Since the airing of the documentary, so far there are over 250 individuals who are now in the Harrods process to settle claims directly with the business.”
Many of the women have found support in each other after speaking out. “Having these ladies has allowed me to open the box I had locked away for so long,” says Gemma, who worked at Harrods from 2007 to 2009. “Now I don’t feel isolated and alone. I used to think, I’m going to take this to my grave. I’d sit at a dinner table and every time someone mentioned Harrods it would be, ‘Oh, you worked at Harrods. Tell us a story,’ and you sit there and go, ‘Oh, there was this one time I did such and such, and you have to find this stupid story to cover that you were raped. How long can you keep doing that before you combust?”
Here six women who worked for Al Fayed across a 23-year period reveal their experiences of the beast of Brompton Road. They are all being represented by the legal team at Justice for Harrods Survivors, which is acting for 128 women, with a further 41 in the process of being signed, and another 100 who have made inquiries.
Jen, 54
For 35 years Jen kept silent about what Mohamed Al Fayed had done to her. She didn’t tell her parents, her brother or even her husband that, during the four and a half years she worked for him at Harrods from 1986 to 1991, he had subjected her to serious sexual assaults and tried to rape her.
Jen joined Harrods as a management trainee a month after her 16th birthday. She met Al Fayed on one of his regular wanders around the office, was interviewed by him that same day and was almost immediately transferred to work for him. “I thought it was because I was a bright young thing,” Jen says. “I now realize it was because I was young, virginal-looking, blonde, naive and malleable.”
Before she had the mandatory medical check-up, Al Fayed told her that the doctor was making sure that she was “clean”. When she asked what he meant, he replied, “I need to know that you’re a virgin.”
It was a “farcical” office environment, “like a soap opera”. Al Fayed kept a large black dildo on his desk and would tease Jen with it. “It was very common to see girls arrive and disappear [from the company], and you didn’t ask where they went,” she says. “We had our phones tapped and surveillance cameras watching our every move.”
“You have to find this stupid story to cover that you were raped. How long can you keep doing that before you combust?”
Jen would often work late and would have to travel to her home in Surrey by coach, so Al Fayed offered her a flat to stay in. “He suggested it would be safer — except of course it wasn’t.”
After she left Harrods Jen spoke to Vanity Fair anonymously. Before the article was published she was contacted by Al Fayed’s head of security, John Macnamara, a former Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent, who was tasked with shutting down allegations about his boss. “I have no idea how they knew it was me,” she says. “He reminded me that they knew where I lived and where my parents lived, and wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to them or me? This is why we kept silent so long. You fear your loved ones may end up under a bus.” Macnamara died in 2019.
She wants the current owners to exorcise Al Fayed from the store: “They talk about their disgust for what happened, yet the Egyptian hall is still there, Mohamed’s face is there.” After his death there were those who still eulogized Al Fayed. “That’s why we are doing what we are doing,” Jen says. “We can’t have our day in court with him. That opportunity is gone for ever. But we can make sure that everyone in the world knows who he was. That’s not said out of bitterness; it’s because people need to know the truth.”
Lindsay Mason, 55
For years, whenever Lindsay Mason had a massage, the masseuse would tell her: “You have so much stress in your shoulders.” She feels she has spent more than three decades carrying the trauma of working for Al Fayed in her skeleton, especially the agony of a nightmare night in Paris where she alleges that he attempted to rape her before, she believes, she was drugged, “trafficked” and raped.
Lindsay, who was 20 in 1989 when she went to work as a personal assistant to Al Fayed, recalls a perfunctory interview process: she met the head PA, then Al Fayed came in and looked her “up and down once”. She too was made to endure a medical examination, this time by a male doctor from a private clinic: “I have a massive trauma about smear tests and have stopped having them, because a man said he was feeling for my ovaries. It was very painful.”
Once she started the job, Lindsay was underworked. “I didn’t have anything to do,” she says. “We were definitely hired to be ornaments to do bad things to. People saw us paraded around like china dolls … and everyone would have known what our purpose was, but no one spoke up. So the culpability goes all around, but especially within the evil serpent that was the store, which killed a certain part of all of us.”
Five months into the job Al Fayed took her to Paris on a private jet. She thought it was a business trip but she soon realized that she “was being trafficked”. During dinner at the Ritz, which Al Fayed owned, Lindsay says she was tapped on the shoulder by a security guard and taken to Dodi’s flat, where the doors were locked behind her (Dodi was not present). The security guard told her, ” ‘Oh, it’s just to keep you safe,’ ” she recalls. “But it was to make sure you couldn’t escape.”
She alleges that Al Fayed sexually assaulted her at the flat, throwing himself on top of her, until she kicked him off. She then ran down the hallway and barricaded herself in her room.
“I came out of my room in Dodi’s flat, had a glass of orange juice or something,” she says. She does not remember being brought out of the room and believes she was drugged. “Suddenly this other colleague was shutting a door [in front of me] and saying, ‘Sorry.’ I was thinking, what are you [the colleague] doing in Paris? But I wasn’t in Paris, I was back in the offices in the store [in London] and so I had not been conscious presumably for that time. That person was under Al Fayed’s instructions to lock me in. Only after I escaped did I discover I had sustained bad injuries.”
About a week later she says she received a letter telling her that her employment had been terminated because she did not use the correct staff entrance.
She thinks the women have been denied justice by his death from old age. “I feel it was very much too late because he was swanning around with the royal family and I know the man is a rapist,” she says. “I wish he could have suffered a modicum of the pain that he put us through.”
“He reminded me that they knew where I lived and where my parents lived, and wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to them or me?”
To stop other people suffering, Lindsay wants companies to pay to affiliate with an independent foundation for abused staff, “a Childline but for the working environment”, and to ensure they have checks and stops to prevent abuse. “There were no checks [at Harrods], and the beast was so big that there was no one we could go to.” Lindsay is now urging other women to come forward. “Join our collective. I hope we have got closure — but, failing that, we’ve got a whole load of brilliant friends.”
Cheska Hill-Wood, 50
When Cheska began working as a junior PA for Al Fayed in 1994, she was made to undergo a health check, including STD tests, which she says were performed by Dr Ann Coxon, now 83 and still practicing on Harley Street. “I was told that it was because his son Dodi had a weak immune system,” Cheska says. “The doctor told me how wonderful Mr Al Fayed was: didn’t he look after his employees so well?”
Cheska, who was 19 and wanted to be an actress, worked in Al Fayed’s office at 60 Park Lane. At the end of her first week he told her that Dodi was producing the sequel to Hook, a film about Peter Pan that he had worked on as a producer in 1991. Al Fayed handed her the script, claiming that she could audition straight to camera and that he would send it to his son. He asked her to change into a pink floral swimming costume that he had brought. She felt uncomfortable but it was late at night and she was on her own, so she complied to try to avoid antagonizing him.
The script featured the line “Take me, take me, please”, she recalls. “And he then came round from behind the camera and grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth, and I pushed him away, and said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Al Fayed then told her, “If you won’t sleep with me I am not helping with your acting career.”
Cheska grabbed her clothes, dressed and fled. She never returned to the office and no one called to check on her. When a future employer asked Harrods for a reference some time later, the store denied any knowledge of her.
In the years afterwards Cheska repeatedly tried to warn the world about Al Fayed. She spoke to Vanity Fair in the late 1990s and to Channel 4 in 2010 for a Dispatches documentary that never aired. Seven years later, saying she had realized “the shame wasn’t mine — it was his”, she waived her right to anonymity for another Dispatches to ensure it could be broadcast. The legal letter this time was much less threatening than past ones. “It was, ‘Oh, he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, think about his grandchildren — they’re at school,’ ” she remembers. “And I just thought, I wasn’t long out of school when he did what he did to me.”
However, the program “slightly sank without trace”. She adds: “I went into it with my eyes wide open, acutely aware that the kickback could have been enormous, and there were social media trolls, but there wasn’t any follow-up. Although it turned out that women came forward to the police, which was fantastic. But I wasn’t told anything, so I just felt very isolated on the top of an obvious platform. It was a frightening silence.”
She was not threatened by anyone in Al Fayed’s camp after broadcast, but says the program didn’t really dent his image: “People still thought of him as this cuddly clown.”
Cheska, who now works for an art dealer, would like his legions of enablers to be exposed. “He got away with as much as he did because a lot of people engineered these situations on his behalf,” she says. “He stood a few paces back and had everyone else doing his dirty work.”
Coxon has denied carrying out sexual health tests on staff members. When approached by The Sunday Times she declined to comment.
Nicole, 51
Nicole was still in the office at 10pm one night in late 2005 when she received a phone call from a police station. “The sergeant said we need to pass on a message to Mr Al Fayed that someone has come into the station with Max Clifford [the celebrity publicist who died in 2017] to make an allegation of sexual assault,” she recalls. “Clifford was saying it would run in the News of the World that Sunday. I told Mohamed, then he told the lawyers and they were straight on it. I had to draft a letter from Al Fayed saying to Clifford, if you run this story I’ll absolutely destroy you, you’ll never work again. And it shut the story down.”
“He stood a few paces back and had everyone else doing his dirty work.”
Nicole was in her early thirties and had been brought in through an external recruiter to work as a senior executive assistant to Al Fayed that year. The office was unlike anywhere she had worked before: the air was thick with anxiety. “It was just so stressful being there,” she recalls. “And you’re on a hamster wheel, so you’re exhausted — I’d get home at 11pm.”
She too was made to undergo an internal examination when she was hired, and an HIV test. “When I questioned it I was told this shtick of ‘You’re so lucky — if you went to Bupa it would cost you thousands’,” she says. “I was told it was because Al Fayed’s son Karim had had meningitis as a child and been left profoundly deaf, so Mohamed was a total germ freak.”
In her two years working for Al Fayed Nicole says the sexual harassment was constant. At the end of an evening he would ask if she wanted to “come and see the pyramids”. When she declined, he would ask, “What’s wrong with you? Are you a lesbian?” He would also try to humiliate her. When Michael Jackson visited Harrods, Al Fayed introduced the pair by saying, “Nicole’s here to look after you. She’s a lesbian.” She cringes at the memory. “I said, ‘Well, not that it matters, but I’m not,’ and here I am, standing in front of Michael Jackson, stuttering that I’m not a lesbian.” There was no point in ever reporting his behavior, she adds: “He’d have heard about it in five seconds flat.”
Nicole is speaking out now to ensure that Al Fayed’s abusive behavior is not forgotten. “I think he still has a sort of legacy, especially after The Crown portrayed him as this lovely, misunderstood, avuncular guy who did so many wonderful things,” she says. “I’m very happy to be tearing that down.”
Katherine, 51
One Saturday morning Katherine — who worked for Al Fayed for three months in 2005 — was the only PA in the office and he decided to test her. He made her hold out her hands, filled them with diamonds of all sizes and told her to take them to the gem department to be valued. There was no bag, no security escort, so she knew he was playing a game with her. “I thought, well, I’ll show you then,” she recalls. “So on a busy Saturday morning, with loads of shoppers around, I took a fortune of diamonds through the store.”
She was 32 when she started working for Al Fayed, having replied to an advert in The Times for a “senior PA to a high-net-worth individual”. She started at the same time as Nicole, but the pair worked different shifts. Her interviews included a medical check by a Harrods doctor, Wendy Snell, including an internal examination; Katherine has kept the report Snell wrote, which includes the line: “The gynaecological swabs, including for chlamydia, also showed no signs of infection, a very reassuring finding.” Snell died in 2022, aged 64.
Katherine describes Al Fayed as “obsessed with sex”. On her first day he took her into a walk-in cupboard, which housed a bizarre collection of items. He showed her a decanter shaped like male genitalia, which had a stopper that spurted. He asked her if she wanted “Egyptian sperm”, and said he’d give her “Egyptian babies”. She recalls: “This was disgusting, and he was between me and the door and I felt increasingly uncomfortable. But I thought maybe this is just his sense of humor.”
That afternoon he called her into his office, telling her that her clothes were distracting. She was wearing a suit from Jigsaw. He then leaned over, put his fingers in her cleavage and ripped the buttons on her shirt. Then Al Fayed hugged her, stuffed banknotes into her hands and told her to buy a new suit. She left Harrods that day in tears. He would later complain about her curly hair and sent her for an unnecessary lip wax: “It was to shatter my self-confidence.”
“I thought I didn’t have the right look,” she says. “I thought I’d done something wrong that made him treat me the way that he did, and I thought Nicole was sailing through, all glossy hair, being an amazing PA who wasn’t having any of this attention.”
On a trip to Paris Katherine stayed at Villa Windsor — the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which Al Fayed leased and renovated — and suddenly realized that she and another PA were alone with Al Fayed, his security team and the housekeepers having left. “I was horrified,” she says. “We were on our own with a dirty old man and a high gate around us.” Her door had no lock, so she barricaded it with a chair and her suitcase. In the morning Al Fayed told her, “Don’t ever f***ing block a door in my house again.”
He then leaned over, put his fingers in her cleavage and ripped the buttons on her shirt.
Back in London he again called her into his office, where she says he ran his hands over her and tried to force his tongue into her mouth. She resisted, stressing that she was “a PA only”, and he eventually ordered her to leave. Her desk was removed from the office and she was sent to walk the dogs and then shred paper. A few days later the HR department called her in, saying that Al Fayed was happy with her work but felt they were not “bonding on a personal level”. They offered Katherine a more junior role and she quit. She recalls walking to Hyde Park and lying on the grass, feeling both embarrassment and “immense” relief.
Gemma, 42
Gemma’s experiences at Harrods came back to haunt her recently at a film night she had organized for her family. “I’d brought out the fairy lights, made popcorn and put on Peter Rabbit, and there’s this long scene in Harrods, as Mr McGregor’s nephew works there, and it’s made to look like this beautiful, magical place. And I had tears streaming down my face. I thought, even though I have tried my hardest to put this behind me, it’s never going away.”
Gemma worked as a PA to Al Fayed from 2007 to 2009. Her life before Harrods had been “sheltered”: she grew up in a small town and trained as a preschool teacher. Aged 25 she was escorted by her mother to the interview for what would be her first job in London. “I was told I got [the job] on the train home and we both cried because we thought it was my big break,” she recalls. “I worked in Harrods for three months and then I was transferred to work with the monster and that whole dream was shattered.”
When she started working for Al Fayed, she was sent for a health check with Snell, who gave her a smear test and “checked” her ovaries. Gemma’s results were sent to Al Fayed before she was even back at her desk. Another time she had a severe chest infection and went to Snell asking for permission to go home; Snell advised her to put on some lipstick because she looked pale. Al Fayed then pulled out a packet of Strepsils and told a horrified Gemma: “Stick one of them in your pussy.”
She eventually bought a Dictaphone to record his behavior. He would demean female staff: one day he made the whole office unpack vibrators and put batteries in them. He would also give her impossible tasks, once asking her to use a satellite phone to book a helicopter to take them from the airport to Fulham Football Club at 3am. “I had no idea how to work the phone and he just sat there and grinned.”
She tried to fend off his attention. A senior PA told her that Al Fayed would eventually move on to another young woman. “So every week that passes — and this is awful — but you’re hoping that somebody else takes the baton,” Gemma says. “But he doesn’t get bored. You’re like a toy to him. He persists and persists until you’re broken.”
His behavior was more frightening on trips. In Abu Dhabi he tried to break into her room. Then, at Villa Windsor in Paris, she woke up to find him in her room, asking, “Are we having a party tonight?” and telling her that it was “important to make love and relax”; she pretended she’d had an allergic reaction to nuts and he left the room furious.
The final incident was again at Villa Windsor, in 2009. Gemma woke up, startled, to find him trying to climb into her bed wearing only a silk dressing gown. She repeatedly told him “No”, but he climbed on top of her and forced himself on her. She cried. After the attack he instructed her to wash herself with Dettol. “He wanted me to erase any trace of him being near me,” she says. “It burnt but I was afraid not to, as I thought I was being filmed.”
Afterwards she hired a lawyer and said she was leaving Harrods on the grounds of sexual harassment. Al Fayed covered up his sexual abuse by intimidating victims into signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). His lawyers arranged for a shredding truck to go to Gemma’s lawyer’s office and everything was destroyed in front of them, including her recordings, although she later discovered that she still had transcripts in her sent emails.
In 2017, after the Dispatches program was broadcast, Gemma received a phone call warning her that she would be “in trouble” if she had participated in the documentary. She hadn’t; she had not even told her family what had happened. “It was embarrassing and you think, are they going to believe you? Are they going to accept it?”
In late September, Harrods said it “would not seek to enforce any NDAs that relate to alleged historical sexual abuse by Fayed that were entered into during the period of his, Fayed’s, ownership”. The store added: “There are no NDAs attached to settlements made under the current ownership.” However, it was unable to say how many NDAs were signed under Al Fayed.
“The Harrods of today is a very different organization to the one owned and controlled by Al Fayed between 1985 and 2010,” the store says, adding that its process for any current or former employees who want to make a claim remains open.
Gemma had thought his death would enable her to move on. “And then he died and I felt so angry and frustrated that nothing ever happened,” she says. “But now we’ve got each other and it finally feels like we may be able to get some closure.”
Rosamund Urwin is the media editor at The Sunday Times
