How much did Harrods boss’s inner circle know?
Accusations of rape and sexual assault against Mohamed Al Fayed raise questions about a series of senior staff from his PR fixers to his head of security.
Over more than two decades, Mohamed Al Fayed used the splendour of Harrods store to seek out dozens of young women who claim to have been subjected to horrific sexual abuse.
More than 100 women have come forward to allege being raped and assaulted by the Egyptian tycoon at locations across the world, from his Knightsbridge headquarters to the Ritz in Paris.
The extent of the alleged offending has raised questions zabout how Al Fayed was able to evade justice before his death at 94 last year. With the businessman now unable to defend himself, victims have challenged the staff and associates who served as Al Fayed’s representatives to reveal what, if anything, they knew.
Lawyers representing Al Fayed’s victims said that his alleged offending bore the hallmarks of an “extreme and extensive sex trafficking” operation.
“It was a massive cover-up,” said Richard Meeran, of the law firm Leigh Day, which is representing one victim and has spoken to several other women who say they were abused by Al Fayed. “And it’s not just a question of people turning a blind eye because people were actively involved in this.”
A veteran libel lawyer who first investigated Al Fayed’s alleged sexual offending in the 1990s further alleged that Al Fayed was the head of a “deeply criminal organisation” who relied on a team of enablers to silence his victims.
David Hooper said that the businessman used a team of former police officers to intimidate victims, as well as aggressive legal tactics to silence them.
Victims are calling for a wider inquiry that should scrutinise Al Fayed’s actions, and seek answers from those who knew him best:
The spokesman who was loyal until the end
When Al Fayed died last August, his former spokesman Michael Cole was one of the first to pay tribute. Years had passed since he had worked for the former Harrods boss, but his loyalty was unwavering. Al Fayed was “fascinating, larger than life, full of great humanity”, Cole told Today (Monday) on BBC Radio 4.
In another interview with Times Radio, he claimed Al Fayed “did more good in the world than all his critics rolled together”. He added: “And I’m very sorry that he’s dead because he was a life enhancing figure and he tremendously supported this country.”
Cole, who previously covered royal stories for the BBC, was taken on as Al Fayed’s spokesman in 1988. He had met him while filming a programme on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He stayed with Al Fayed officially for the next decade with his tenure covering the death of the tycoon’s son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales.
Henry Porter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, has described Cole as “so important in his defence in repeated scandals”. Porter had spent time gathering evidence about Al Fayed, who had sued over a profile that alleged he was a serial abuser. He wrote in the Observer this weekend that Al Fayed had first tried to settle the case “principally in the person of Michael Cole”. (The case never went to trial and Porter later passed his evidence, which he gathered with the lawyer, David Hooper, to journalists).
The journalist Sophia Money-Coutts has claimed that Cole asked her not to include any “banter” when she interviewed his boss.
In a piece for The Times last week, she wrote that Cole told her: “Mr Al Fayed is going to take one look at you and say something to the effect of, ‘Will you be my third wife?’ So could I please have your assurance that none of this light-hearted banter will make it into your article?”
Despite his enthusiastic tributes after Al Fayed’s death, Cole has stayed silent in recent days.
Cole’s wife, Jane, told MailOnline that her husband “is not giving any interviews or talking at the moment”. But she claimed he had not been aware of rape or sexual assault allegations during his time working for Al Fayed. Cole himself has previously said that he “never saw or heard anything to his discredit or I would not have worked for him”. Cole’s wife did not comment when approached by the Times.
The disgraced publicist who joked Al Fayed was ‘A randy old sod’
Before Max Clifford himself was accused of sexual offences, he defended Al Fayed’s behaviour towards women. The late publicist, right, who was jailed in 2014 for historical sex assaults, was recorded talking to an undercover journalist, Chris Atkins, about Al Fayed, who was not named for legal reasons when the documentary was broadcast in 2009. “It’s like Mohamed, you know, Harrods, who’s 76 going on 18 when it comes to young ladies”, he is recorded telling the journalist. “He’s a randy old sod ... Fine.
“So I’ve stopped this, stopped that ... whatever, whatever, whatever.”
Clifford said that Al Fayed paid pounds 250,000 a year to the CHASE hospice of which he was a patron. “It all works extremely well,” he added.
The unredacted video was broadcast in the BBC’s documentary last week. Clifford, who died in 2017, also said that “if he is groping 17-year-olds that are quite willing because they are being paid a lot of money - fine.” Al Fayed had appointed Clifford’s company as part of a pounds 300,000-a-year deal in 2000, the BBC reported at the time.
The other mouthpieces
Cole was not the only former royal correspondent to have been poached by Al Fayed. Katharine Spence was headhunted to become Al Fayed’s fifth spokesman in ten years in 2007. She had covered the royal family for Sky News and interviewed Prince Harry to mark his 21st birthday.
Of all those hired to represent Al Fayed, Spence was in position at a particularly crucial time for the Harrods boss.
It was 2008 and he was facing an investigation into claims of abuse by a 15-year-old girl. Although this was not the first time that serious allegations of a sexual nature had been levelled against Al Fayed, it was the first time that the public became aware he had been interviewed by the police.
Spence issued a brusque statement on behalf of Al Fayed, which she read out to the media while standing in front of Harrods. Al Fayed “vehemently denies” the allegations, she said, then issued a further statement on his behalf in 2009 to affirm his innocence when the investigation was dropped.
At the time, she was married to Simon Witty, a top lawyer, and used his surname professionally. When the couple split up, sources told the Daily Mail that Spence had been “hugely grateful” for the support of Al Fayed and had told friends: “He has been amazing.”
Spence now works at the communications consultancy, Maitland. After watching the BBC documentary she said: “I did not know of the seriousness of what is being claimed at all. I am absolutely appalled and horrified by the allegations. I am in shock. My heart goes out to them [the women]”. When The Times contacted Spence again yesterday (Sunday), she declined to comment.
Al Fayed cultivated a roster of other highly experienced former journalists and public relations experts to represent him. They included Conor Nolan, who joined as a spokesman in 2005, having previously worked with the businessman for three years as an external consultant, and Laurie Mayer, who quit in 2000. Chester Stern, a former crime correspondent at the Mail on Sunday, represented Al Fayed from 2001 to 2004. There is no suggestion that any of the individuals named were aware of any wrongdoing.
The lawyers
When news first broke in 2008 that Al Fayed had been interviewed by the police in relation to claims he had sexually abused a 15-year-old girl, he instructed Schillings, one of the most prominent claimant law firms in Britain. The firm is alleged to have written to the Daily Mail, who had reported that inquiries were continuing, that the coverage of the girl’s claims was “defamatory” and a breach of Al Fayed’s human rights, while also requesting the article’s source. The police investigation into Al Fayed was dropped in 2009. While many of the alleged assaults described in the BBC documentary had occurred by 2009, these stories would not enter the public domain in Al Fayed’s lifetime.
The tycoon also relied on the now defunct firm DJ Freeman. Hooper, who began looking into Al Fayed on behalf of Vanity Fair after the businessman sought to sue the magazine for publishing claims that he was a serial abuser in 1995, told The Times that the law firm used “extremely aggressive” tactic.
The head of security and others staff
John Macnamara, a former director of security at Harrods, is said to have threatened and intimidated women in an attempt to stop them speaking out.During his investigation into Al Fayed in the 1990s in preparation for Vanity Fair’s libel case, Hooper said he encountered Macnamara and his team threatening the victims.
One woman who spoke to the BBC claimed that Macnamara, who died in 2019, had tried to stop her speaking to Vanity Fair in the 1990s about allegations against Al Fayed. She recalled: “He said I wasn’t to be involved in the article, and if I went against his advice, he knew where my parents lived.”
Hooper further alleged that another of Al Fayed’s senior security officials tried to frame him by offering to provide a video supposedly stolen from the businessman, an offer he rejected.
Tom Bower, Al Fayed’s unauthorised biographer, claimed in The Sunday Times this weekend that some of the tycoon’s bodyguards suspected or knew about women being raped. He added that “some of the store’s senior managers heard their employees’ complaints and did nothing”. A human resources manager at Harrods between 1990 and 1994 has claimed she was ordered by Al Fayed’s senior assistant to find attractive young sales assistants he had seen in the store and send them to his office. The identity of this senior assistant is not known.
Doctors
Women recruited in their teens and early twenties to work in Al Fayed’s private office said that they were required by Wendy Snell, Harrods’s corporate GP, to undertake medicals that included intimate examinations.
They were told it was because of his son’s weak immune system but later realised that it was preparing them for sexual abuse by Al Fayed. Snell died two years ago. Porter has told how the evidence he gathered as editor of Vanity Fair had focused on doctors used by Al Fayed. One woman, Natacha, who began working for Harrods at 19, said last week she had “unnecessary and intrusive” examinations. “Given hindsight, I was being checked for purity,” she said.
The Times
