I took two things away from the afternoon, nearly 25 years ago, that I spent in the company of Mohamed Al Fayed.
The first was to prove quite useful in my journalistic career. It is a principle I later called Al Fayed’s law: an individual’s bank balance is inversely proportional to their tolerance for criticism.
The second was more of a passing observation, the kind of thing you notice about someone’s surroundings or general demeanour and store away, not sure of its significance. But it struck me as noteworthy enough to merit a line in the article I wrote about him, an article that so incensed him that he publicly announced he was withdrawing plans to relocate the global headquarters of Harrods online operation to Dublin. See Al Fayed’s law above.
It’s worth mentioning here that nobody who worked for him seemed to have been apprised of his plan to move his Harrods ecommerce business to Dublin. Or even, as far as I could tell, of his plans to launch an ecommerce business. In any case, the thing that might never have happened anyway was now definitely not going ahead because I had offended him.
My meeting with Mohamed Al Fayed went well. Then I mentioned the young women in short skirts
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The line that enraged him – resulting in a flurry of irate emails, threats of legal action and eventually an unhappy parting of ways with a PR man – was about skirts. I thought readers would be interested in something I found curious and a bit creepy: Al Fayed’s personal office was staffed by a handful of young, strikingly attractive women who happened, on the day I was there, to be wearing short skirts. I was in my early 20s; a few seemed younger than me.
Al Fayed took issue with this characterisation of his personal staff. He insisted that the women working mostly in silence during my visit were wearing trousers. I was certain that the swishy garments that fell to around their knees were skirts.
Until we fell out over hemlines, I thought my meeting with Al Fayed had gone rather well: I spent a whole afternoon with him; he brought me on a tour of Harrods, posing in front of the grotesque gold statue of himself dressed as a pharaoh, before retreating upstairs to his office. I still have the ugly, horse-themed silk scarf in a presentation Harrods box and the “Who Killed Diana and Dodi?” VHS tape he presented with a flourish on my departure.
I felt sorry for him – a man who, despite his vast wealth, struck me as paranoid, foul-mouthed, desperate to ingratiate himself with the establishment, strangely terrified of germs. Mostly, though, he seemed cleaved by grief. It wasn’t my job to write an article he would like, but I didn’t expect the reaction I got.
He did not appreciate my description of him as “hysterical” (I meant funny – he said I called him deranged); nor my final impression of him, a recently bereaved father full of rage, as “slightly pathetic”. But it was the skirts that pushed him over the edge, unleashing apoplexies of fury and recrimination that I now suspect would strike those young women in his office as terrifyingly familiar but which I found ridiculous and quite amusing.
The row over the skirts – skirtgate, as my colleagues in that newspaper called it – came back to me recently as I read the allegations about him. The man I met was not, in fact, the figure of pity I took him for; a sad and isolated old man torn apart at the death of his adored son, but a serial predator and rapist, on a level with Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein.
In a new BBC documentary and podcast series, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods, five women say they were raped by him and more than 20 subsequently came forward. The stories are still coming – at the latest count, 37 women who say they were abused by him have consulted a lawyer.
[ Multiple women accuse Mohamed Al Fayed of rape and sexual assaultOpens in new window ]
We now understand the predators’ playbook much better than we did then; how men like Al-Fayed or Jimmy Savile in Britain or George Gibney or Eamon Casey here get away with it by hiding in plain sight. Al Fayed’s power and money fuelled his predation but, as with Savile, his general strangeness and studied eccentricity were useful alibis.
I touched a nerve when I hinted at his predilection for young and beautiful women. What I did not see was the climate of fear they operated in. I didn’t see the CCTV cameras that we now know were in that office and in the staff apartment, or the sexual health tests that they – or certainly many of their colleagues – had to undergo to work there.
Who else saw something a bit off? Who knew? Who facilitated him? Who cleaned up after him? The answer is wearyingly familiar. Lots of people. Al Fayed was questioned by detectives just once – in 2008 over the alleged sexual abuse of a 15-year-old, a complaint that was subsequently withdrawn. Files of evidence about him were later passed by police to the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service. He was never charged. British police now say 19 women made allegations against Al Fayed between 2005 and 2023 – including three allegations of rape. These went nowhere.
He died last year at 94, his life and wealth entirely untroubled by the shattered fragments of the lives he destroyed.
The question that should be asked now is not why those women waited until he was dead to come forward, but why they didn’t feel they could tell their stories when he was alive, or why they tried and were not heard. The answer is obvious. Al Fayed banked on the fact that money and status were a protective shield around him, and – a conclusion no less depressing for its inevitability – he was right.