The Establishment cover-up has been finally blown. Thirty years after Mohamed Al-Fayed was first exposed as a serial rapist, the BBC has finally exposed his appalling crimes in a new documentary, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods. Cynics will question why, one year after his death, his reputation remained relatively unblemished until now.
The crimes alleged in the documentary are grave and took place on a quite staggering scale. Twenty women accused Fayed of sexual abuse, including five allegations of rape.
It detailed incidents of abuse in London, Paris, St Tropez and Abu Dhabi. It speaks of how the Harrods owner would tour the department store’s vast sales floor to identify female staff to prey upon. This was abuse that took place over decades.
Those of us who have reported on Fayed are not surprised by this news. I exposed his sexual misconduct in an unauthorized biography published in 1998. This followed a Vanity Fair article in 1995 that first established Fayed’s habitual rape.
Subsequently, Scotland Yard investigated at least three complaints of sexual offenses, including rape, by Fayed and in 2008 submitted the evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service under Keir Starmer. Outrageously, none of those women’s evidence was considered sufficiently credible either by the police or the CPS. The same state agencies did not prosecute Fayed for blackmail, bribery, safe-breaking and violent threats.
In 2017, Channel 4’s Dispatches broadcast allegations of groping, assault and harassment, airing another investigation on Channel 4 News the following year. But even then, upon his death, much of the media continued to broadcast bunkum praise about his august career, his generous charitable contributions and his doting loyalty to his family and the late Queen.
When I was interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s Last Word in the week after Fayed’s death, I described him as a pimp, rapist, a corrupt businessman and a brazen liar. None of that truth was broadcast. Instead, the BBC stuck to the mantra that the Egyptian was a colorful tycoon, albeit slightly controversial.
A BBC spokesman said: “As our powerful coverage has shown … there has long been suggestion and rumor in relation to Mohammed Al-Fayed, but it is only now — because of the brave testimony of survivors and many months of investigation – that the true horror of his actions has been publicly revealed.”
The media has persistently stuck to Fayed’s own invention of his name as “Al-Fayed”, a concoction he produced in the London kitchen of the Dubai embassy in 1970 with his partner in crime, Mahdi al Tajir, the desert kingdom’s first ambassador.
Even now, no one in Whitehall or elsewhere wants to acknowledge that Fayed’s rapes and other crimes were protected by a corrupt arrangement between John Macnamara, his chief of security and a former detective chief superintendent at Scotland Yard’s Fraud Squad, and police officers across London. Infamous as the King of Digging Dirt, Macnamara ran Fayed’s blackmail and oppression services. Any woman who complained about abuse or rape by Macnamara’s master — and there were dozens over 30 years — was ruthlessly silenced by the ex-policeman using threats and blackmail. Especially Harrods’ employees.
Much of the media continued to broadcast bunkum praise about his august career, his generous charitable contributions and his doting loyalty to his family and the late Queen.
After I named in my book the women sexually attacked by Fayed, Macnamara set up a sting operation to entrap me in a crime. The “crime” was Macnamara’s offer to sell me Fayed’s private photo album — which he had allegedly stolen — of his favorite girlfriends in sexual poses. I would have been arrested by Chelsea police as I handed over the money for buying stolen goods.
Some of Fayed’s bodyguards — and he never moved from his Knightsbridge store without the protection of four armed men — suspected or knew about Fayed’s rapes. Similarly, some of the store’s senior managers heard their employees’ complaints and did nothing. Many were sacked in awful circumstances contrived by Fayed with Macnamara. Accusing Fayed’s critics of invented crimes — shoplifting or fraud — was Macnamara’s speciality to silence Harrods’ managers.
Many women attempted to rebuff Fayed, but not all succeeded. For example, the daughter of an American diplomat was enticed by Fayed’s offer to become his interior designer of his flagship hotel, the Ritz in Paris. After visiting the hotel, Fayed suggested that they also inspect his beachside house in St Tropez. Once there, he suggested a trip on his yacht, moored nearby. Once on board, he raped the terrified woman. On her return to London, she decided not to press charges. Fearing a ruined life, she returned silently to America.
Undoubtedly, Fayed chortled about his success. Not only did he enjoy abusing European women but he felt immune to exposure. First, by the women’s fear of social denigration but also because of Britain’s Draconian libel laws. Britain’s courts, Fayed knew, protected the guilty from honest exposure by newspapers and books.
Even his racism was barely acknowledged. The Egyptian would only engage with — and rape — European women. His racist loathing of black women even extended to banning them, if possible, from serving customers at Harrods.
Fayed became a serial rapist in 1981 after the success of Chariots of Fire, the Academy Award-winning film about the 1924 Olympics. Presenting himself as the film’s producer, he held casting sessions for aspiring actresses across Europe. Long before the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was jailed for sexual assaults, Fayed was raping girls in hotels after he promised a role in a mythical film.
There was a perversity in Fayed’s violent pursuit of innocent women. In parallel, he habitually used prostitutes to feed his insatiable sexual appetite. Obsessed by sex, he employed a former prostitute to procure women, especially from the north of England. An endless procession of girls arrived at his Park Lane flat to be used and then discarded. On the floor below, a German woman known as “Petra” cared for a bevy of girls always dressed in gingham with white knickers.
Fayed flattered himself that he could abuse people with impunity, especially after he bought Harrods in 1985. Fayed’s takeover of the store was sanctioned by the British government only because he successfully posed as a fabulously rich pasha, the owner of his ancient family’s huge estates and fleet of ships. The phony pharaoh’s big lie was merrily endorsed by City of London bankers.
Some in London were puzzled by the Establishment’s approval of Fayed buying Harrods, despite his career of duplicity.
Born in comparative poverty in Alexandria in 1929, Fayed, a former Coca-Cola street seller, had learned the power of deception from his future father-in-law, Mohamed Khashoggi, an amusing veterinary surgeon.
Through lies, Khashoggi posed as a doctor and was appointed as the King of Saudi Arabia’s personal physician. Then he was promoted as Saudi Arabia’s director of public health. Fayed accompanied Khashoggi as his assistant to Riyadh. Over two years, Fayed learned how to profit from lies, not least in business deals. He returned to Alexandria with enough money to marry Khashoggi’s daughter Samira, eventually the mother of Dodi.
Not only did he enjoy abusing European women but he felt immune to exposure.
The seeds of later disaster were sown by their marriage in 1954. Samira’s elder brother Adnan was not only a successful businessman, who would earn billions of dollars selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, he was also renowned as a famous Lothario, hosting debauched parties with beautiful girls on his private Boeing airliner.
Envious of Adnan, Fayed lacked Khashoggi’s natural charm but he could act as the life and soul of every party, eagerly mimicking Khashoggi’s sexual appetite. But while Adnan bought women, he never raped them.
When Fayed arrived in London in 1962, fleeing from Haiti’s murderous dictator Papa Doc Duvalier — whom he had defrauded — the wayward businessman relied on an invented glittering family history to pose as an international tycoon. Usefully, he possessed a diplomatic Haitian passport describing him as a Kuwaiti sheikh. His chauffeured Rolls-Royce was hired by the day.
Hosting sex parties in a small Mayfair flat, Fayed enticed Dubai’s ambassador, Mahdi al-Tajir, to get lucrative contracts for his company, Costain, to develop Dubai. With the illicit cash deposited in a Liechtenstein bank, Fayed bought a bigger home and built a giant spa bath that, Fayed boasted, adjoined his seduction room. The germophobe’s only fear was syphilis and he would squeeze lemon juice onto his skin, believing it would protect him.
Financial success as a humdrum middleman brought Fayed into a relationship with Tiny Rowland, of Lonrho, who he then bested in a battle to buy Harrods. No actor in London’s theaterland could have bettered Fayed’s performance as a global tycoon to snatch the store from the man damned by prime minister Ted Heath as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”.
As the unexpected owner of Harrods and the host of the royal family at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, Fayed believed he had become invulnerable. Walking with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip across the turf each year from 1985, Fayed was convinced that fame had bestowed a crown on him. “I love this country,” he repeated. But the exposure of his contrived background sabotaged his repeated attempts to gain British citizenship.
Rejection mortified Fayed. The friendless loner, an outcast even in Egypt, could only buy relationships with cash. Behind the bonhomie — the joker handing out gifts to visitors — was a wounded animal with an inferiority complex, constantly seeking revenge for repeated embarrassments — perceived by him as injustices. Fayed’s rape of innocent, defenseless women, I believe, was partly his assertion of self-importance and a momentary cure for his burning resentment.
For decades, all this was known. And yet, Britain’s libel laws and a supine establishment allowed the criminal to escape justice. Exposing him now should shame those who knew the truth during his lifetime.
Tom Bower is the author of Fayed: The Unauthorized Biography
