13 Women Have Accused Mohamed Al Fayed, Father of Princess Diana’s Boyfriend, of Sexual Assault

A year after the August 2023 death of Mohamad Al Fayed, 13 women have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault. Al Fayed, an Egyptian-born tycoon, owned the British department store Harrods from 1985 to 2010. He was also the father of Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s boyfriend, who died with her in a 1997 car crash. After their deaths, Mohamad Al Fayed installed a public memorial inside Harrods and pushed for continued investigations into the deaths.

In a new documentary, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods, the BBC is releasing interviews with women who say they were assaulted by Al Fayed when they worked at the company.

“Any place of work has a duty to ensure the safety of its employees. Without question, the company failed these ladies,” Bruce Drummond, a lawyer representing some of the victims, told the outlet for the documentary. “The spider’s web of corruption and abuse in this company was unbelievable and very dark.”

In a public statement, Harrods said they have settled claims against Al Fayed “in the quickest way possible” since learning about allegations against him in 2023, noting that the settlement process is “still available” for any current or former employee. “We are utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed,” the statement continued. “These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms. We also acknowledge that during this time as a business we failed our employees who were his victims and for this we sincerely apologize.”

Of the 13 women the BBC spoke to, four say Al Fayed raped them, and all said they felt intimidated by a culture of fear at Harrods. One woman who spoke to the outlet said she approached police with a rape allegation in 2008 when she was 15, but no charges were filed. Some accusers said they believed their phones had been tapped. In an interview for the documentary, a former deputy director of security at Harrods’s, Eamon Coyle, said that part of his job was listening to recorded phone calls from employees.

Al Fayed was a central character in the final season of The Crown, which portrayed his fascination with the royal family. In the 1980s, Al Fayed toke over the lease of the Paris home that once belonged to King Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson, after Edward’s abdication. In 2004, Vanity Fair reported that Al Fayed had hired private investigators and spent millions of dollars trying to prove that the death of Diana and his son were the result of murder, and appealed the French court ruling that the crash was accidental.

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