I knew about Fayed’s sex abuse but was silenced by a system that protects the rich
I always enjoyed The Crown – even if the royal drama’s sheen of class disguised that it belonged to the higher cobblers – but the final season left me with a feeling of disgust. It painted Mohamed Fayed (the ‘Al-’ before his surname was an affectation, like so much about that Egyptian guttersnipe turned Phoney Pharaoh) as an amusing figure. In their depiction, he was a tetchy mogul and fond but pushy father who encouraged the romance between his son Dodi and the Princess of Wales, and won public sympathy when the pair perished in a car crash.
Fayed had actually tipped off photographers that Dodi and Diana were at his Ritz hotel in Paris. It was a marvellous piece of publicity for a contrived “fairytale romance”, which he hoped would lead to his son marrying the mother of the future King and which, ultimately, led to the pair’s fatal pursuit by paparazzi. Far from being an entertaining bit-part player, Fayed was lucky to avoid blame for Diana’s tragic death.
After the Princess died, he continued to exploit her in the most repulsive manner. He went so far as to suggest that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s baby and that Prince Philip colluded with MI6 to have her bumped off because no child with Arab blood could be allowed to pollute the Royal family.
There was nothing funny about Mohamed Fayed. He was a proper, old-fashioned monster, a Mafia-style boss who used a combination of money and fear to silence anyone who dared accuse him of wrong-doing. The affectionate, pantomime Netflix portrayal was just one more depressing instance of the disgusting old fraud being let off the hook.
During the late 1990s, a couple of women who had worked for “Mohamed” contacted me with hair-raising stories about his abuse of female staff, his appalling racism and the constant stream of young blondes who came through the doors of 60 Park Lane, his London base. Back in the early eighties, long before Fayed bought Harrods, his then PA and air stewardess, Penelope Simpson, told me that Friday nights were always “play night”. Fayed would get a call at the same time each week from a phonebox and a woman would make arrangements to drop off a young girl who would be paid in cash. “The teenage girls were clearly coming from a private school,” Simpson recalled. Fayed did like his victims to be well-spoken.
When a BBC documentary revealed last week that five women who worked at Harrods claim they were raped by Fayed, it was hardly the nasty surprise the media chose to pretend that it was. The only shocking thing is that, like Jimmy Savile, Fayed was allowed to go to his grave, aged 94, without paying for his crimes.
So you might ask why I, and countless other journalists, failed to expose him when there were women prepared to tell their stories 25 years ago.
Welcome to two-tier British justice; for the few, not the many. Libel actions in this country are potentially so expensive that you need deep pockets to defend one. A sales assistant at Harrods could blow her lifetime earnings on a week in court. Fayed calculated he could molest and rape such people with impunity. He was right.
Of course, the women could always go to the papers, but the media will hesitate to run stories about rich, influential people who can afford the best barristers unless the evidence appears to be cast-iron. And victims are likely to be scared and easily intimidated. David Hooper, a veteran libel lawyer who first investigated Fayed’s alleged sexual offending in the 1990s, claims that Fayed was the head of a “deeply criminal organisation” who relied on a “team of enablers”, including former police officers, as well as aggressive legal tactics to silence victims.
Like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, to whom Penny Simpson compares him, Fayed would shower the powerful and famous with gifts and freebies; favours he could call in at any time. There were 30 flats at 60 Park Lane and many household names enjoyed his hospitality. (There will be plenty of rock stars, Hollywood actors, minor royals and politicians feeling nervous and uncomfortable today. I know some of their names.) “In quiet periods,” Simpson recalls, “my job was compiling a Rolodex the size of a small Ferris wheel. Many different hands had filled out its thousands of index cards. Mohamed would deposit scraps of paper on my desk with scrawled titbits; ‘younger wife,’ or ‘vintage Patek Philippe, check family’, or the sinister one word ‘Debt.’ An elaborate spider’s web for me to cross-reference, information constantly updated yet never discarded.”
Although Fayed tried it on with Penny a few times, she firmly rebuffed him. What saved her from being raped, she thinks, is that his female employees usually travelled in pairs for safety and it wasn’t worth Fayed’s while to cause trouble in his own back office. Members of staff were spoiled to keep them sweet while living under constant threat. “Mohamed’s largesse was unpredictable, and designed to encourage dependency,” recalls Penny.
“Salary increases were never formalised, rather they appeared as small wads of cash, often in the ubiquitous brown envelopes. He liked to distribute gifts of jewellery – sometimes valuable, often not. He knew we were unfamiliar with real gemstones and enjoyed our confusion. “You have that butterfly watch I gave you?” he’d ask out of nowhere. “The jewels are good, yes?””
To work in Fayed’s office was to exist in a gilded cage, to have all your needs (from medical appointments to posh underwear) paid for. But it was on the understanding that your loyalty was absolute. When Fayed first interviewed her, Penny Simpson recalls him boasting that no one who worked for him had ever been required to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). “He made himself pretty clear. No staff had to sign an NDA because they knew there would be frightening consequences if they said anything. He had some seriously nasty friends. And the climate was very different back then. A woman alleging sexual assault would not have been believed.”
The only journalists with the guts and guile to try and expose the brute were Henry Porter (for Vanity Fair) and Tom Bower. In 1998, in “Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography”, Bower, a brilliant sleuth, disclosed how Fayed’s “enforcers” would shut down allegations about the boss. “By far the most intriguing was the security chief, John MacNamara,” wrote Bower, “A former detective chief superintendent and head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad, Macnamara [who died in 2019 aged 83] had overseen countless dishonest operations around the world as he sought to protect his employer and destroy his enemies.”
Macnamara, “a master in blackmail, falsification, intrusion and corruption, not to mention threats of violence”, took care of the rough stuff. Fayed also had a director of public affairs, Michael Cole, to burnish his public persona. Smoothie-chops Cole, he of the luxuriant bouffant hair and impeccable manners, was as well-spoken as any of the women Fayed allegedly raped. He traded on his career as the BBC’s former royal correspondent, which lent lustre to his grubby little master. When Fayed died last August, Cole, now 81 and retired to a converted barn in Suffolk, was given ample airtime to pay touching tribute. Fayed was “fascinating, larger than life, full of great humanity”, Cole told Radio 4’s Today programme. I nearly choked on my Bran Flakes.
What on earth were the BBC (and most other media outlets) doing allowing such nauseating encomiums to such a despicable charlatan? The only caveat Cole – hair now snowy but still abundant – could bring himself to utter was “highly controversial”. Ah, yes, Michael, the “highly controversial” alleged serial sex abuser and rapist you served so devotedly. What suckers we are for “larger than life” characters like Fayed and Savile who hide their darkness beneath a buffoonish persona.
Following the BBC documentary, Cole’s wife, Jane, said the revelations had “come as a shock” to them. For once, Fayed’s mouthpiece had no honeyed words to smooth over his late master’s amorality. Cat got your tongue, Michael?
Suddenly, after decades of cover-up and institutional indifference, Fayed’s alleged victims are now seeking compensation from Harrods (Fayed sold it for £1.5 billion in 2010 to the Qatar Investment Authority). The Knightsbridge store says it is investigating whether any of the current staff were involved in the alleged abuse.
Is that it? With the greatest sympathy and respect to the women concerned, this is a much bigger issue than whether someone in the Harrods personnel department quietly sacked and paid off a perfumery assistant who was making claims about the proprietor. Grateful to avoid a spotlight on their own shortcomings, the media and legal establishment are focusing on the “timeline of Harrods’ sexual predator”.
Where is the pressure on the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who somehow managed to avoid getting Fayed prosecuted when even a mere newspaper columnist like me had credible witnesses a quarter of a century ago, who were offering me details of his grotesque misconduct?
The facts are damning. Fayed was investigated by police three times yet was never prosecuted.
In 2008, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in the Harrods boardroom. The CPS said there was not enough evidence to prosecute, citing “conflicting evidence”.
In 2015, Metropolitan police investigated him following allegations he had raped a woman in 2013. Once again, the CPS reviewed the files and there was no prosecution.
In 2018, multiple women came forward to tell their stories to the police. That time, a file didn’t even get as far as the CPS.
While the CPS did review both their Fayed files, a spokesperson said: “To bring a prosecution, the CPS must be confident there is a realistic prospect of conviction – in each instance, our prosecutors looked carefully at the evidence and concluded this wasn’t the case.”
Why might that be? What could account for the curious inability of Scotland Yard’s finest to track down a few Penelope Simpsons to testify against a billionaire with royal connections? Hmmm. Might a few hampers with the famous Harrods livery have arrived on certain doorsteps, or even the little brown envelopes Fayed used to silence staff? Did John Macnamara still have any sway over colleagues in the police force where he worked for 28 years and for which he had been head of – cue hollow laughter – the fraud squad? Heaven forbid.
Meanwhile, the CPS – whose then-director of public prosecutions was an upstanding fellow by the name of Keir Starmer – was building up form when it came to discounting the claims of working-class women. In 2009, the CPS took the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile on the grounds of our old friend “insufficient evidence”. In reality, one of our most proudly prolific child sex offenders had assaulted so many young people that it would have been quite a stretch for Plod not to find one or two in the entire country who could have landed Jim’ll Fix It in court. Who knows, perhaps the BBC star pervert’s day job as “national treasure” and mate of Prince Charles proved alibi enough?
An inquiry into this wretched failure by the police and the CPS did not suggest that Keir Starmer was personally involved in the decisions made about Savile, although some might wonder why the head of the service was not told about such a high-profile case. The CPS says that records relating to the decision not to charge Savile were not kept, which was “in line with its data retention policy”. A marvellous excuse, you must admit, and so many of them!
Both Savile and Fayed were allowed to take their guilty secrets to the grave thanks to a cowardly, colluding establishment. How many public figures ensnared in the Rolodex spider’s web kept in Fayed’s office as an insurance policy might have been embarrassed by his conviction, I wonder? Hard not to conclude it was simply easier to look the other way.
Had either man ever been brought to trial, no doubt they would have had their peccadillos explained away by the best senior counsel money can buy; counsel like Huw Edwards’ defence team. They claimed that, among other traumas, the former presenter’s distress over not getting into Oxford (poor chap had to settle for Cardiff University) had led to such lifelong feelings of inadequacy that he had to look at the worst imaginable images of child sexual abuse to make himself feel better.
The depraved BBC anchor paid tens of thousands for nude pictures from a Welsh boy younger than his own sons (“Ach-y-fi!” as Huw’s Welsh mother and mine would cry in horror) was let off without a jail sentence. This tells us all we need to know about where raped children and preyed-upon shop assistants come in the hierarchy of British justice. Look how the people who do pluck up courage are treated.
More than a hundred women have now come forward making allegations of abuse against the Egyptian tycoon. Gemma, who was allegedly raped by Fayed in 2009, says she provided audio tapes of his vile conduct, but lawyers shredded her evidence in front of a senior Harrods HR official. Rightly, victims are calling for an inquiry that scrutinises not only Fayed’s behaviour, but those who appear to have enabled him. The Metropolitan Police and the CPS, which absurdly struggled to establish a “realistic prospect of conviction”, must themselves be suspects.
From her two years as Fayed’s PA, Penelope Simpson says what she remembers most is “the constant battle we waged against germs. The incessant washing and drying of crockery and glasses with tissues (as tea towels were forbidden). We travelled with crates of Kleenex and wet wipes with which we would swab door handles and lavatory levers and lift buttons. Room service was always re-plated on dishes we had personally sanitised, and table tops and chair arms disinfected after each guest departed.” Fayed had prospective victims tested for sexual and other diseases (he was particularly worried about TB).
How telling that the dirty old man should be obsessed with cleanliness for himself.
If there was any fairness, Mohamed Fayed would have been disgraced during his lifetime, not after death. I hope that he, Savile and Jeffrey Epstein are in an especially toasty corner of Hell (They’re keeping a seat warm for Harvey Weinstein). But please let’s not pretend that the stories about Fayed’s alleged rapes and abuse of young women “defy belief”, as people now conveniently claim. Given a system that privileges the rich and the ruthless over ordinary women and children, such claims are all too believable.