For those who wonder why Mohamed Fayed has been able to escape the just consequences of his actions – the rape and sexual assault of a staggering number of young female employees – for so long, one word will suffice: fear.
As one of his victims says in the BBC documentary Al Fayed, Predator At Harrods: ‘We were all so scared. He actively cultivated a culture of fear.”
Emma Barnett, who interviewed one of the Harrods owner’s victims, explained that what had hurt them most recently was “the recent rosy portrayal of Fayed in Netflix’s The Crown as this colourful, fatherly character… .that was kind to everyone from Princess Diana to everyone else. child he met in his perfect shop’.
As one of his victims says in the BBC documentary Al Fayed, Predator At Harrods: ‘We were all so scared. He actively cultivated a culture of fear’
My wife Rosa Monckton was friends with Princess Diana. In 1997, Fayed tried to fire my wife as director of the jewelry store Tiffany & Co in London, when Rosa – after Diana’s death – declared that her friend had no intention of marrying Dodi. Rosa is pictured here with the late princess at Tiffany & Co’s summer party at the Mayfair Store in July 1993
Although that was the work of The Crown’s screenwriter, Peter Morgan, who defends his version on the grounds of artistic license, this travesty of the truth owes much to the efforts of Fayed’s oily PR man, Michael Cole, a former BBC Royal Correspondent, he certainly deserved the millions that Fayed paid him over many years (as a full member of the Harrods board).
My wife, Rosa Monckton, has experienced firsthand how scary Fayed can be. Rosa had been on holiday with Diana (who was godmother to our daughter Domenica) on a boat along the Greek coast, less than a fortnight before the late Princess’s violent death in Paris.
So when Fayed began promoting the grotesque conspiracy theory in October 2003 – more than six years later – that Diana had told him she was pregnant with his son Dodi, that Buckingham Palace knew about it and had her murdered in order to “kill a Muslim royal” child’, Rosa felt obliged to reveal that her friend had gotten her period while they were on the boat, and therefore could not have been pregnant at the time of her death. This fact was later confirmed by blood tests for the long-delayed inquest in 2007.
At the time, Tiffany’s New York headquarters wanted to open a branch in Harrods, and Fayed called the CEO, Bill Chaney, to demand that he fire Rosa if he wanted the franchise.
Shortly afterwards Rosa called me (I was away) to say that a car and driver had just arrived at night at our remote house in the countryside – it is not even on a road, but along a long, unmarked path – to to deliver an order. threatening letter from Fayed, accusing her of being involved in the ‘plot to kill Diana’.
Fayed had even tried to fire my wife as director of the Tiffany & Co jewelry store in London in 1997, when Rosa – after Diana’s death – declared that her friend had no intention of marrying Dodi.
At the time, Tiffany’s New York headquarters wanted to open a branch in Harrods, and Fayed called the CEO, Bill Chaney, to demand that he fire Rosa if he wanted the franchise.
Rosa’s American boss called her to ask what on earth was going on. She explained the reason for Fayed’s demand (which left him all the more baffled). She kept her job and Tiffany never opened in Harrods. That was good news for the female sales staff.
Things went well for Rosa – and not just because in her case Fayed’s attack did not involve physical intimidation. The point is that, unlike the young women who endured his disgusting depredations, my wife was not in his power or his wages. His victims were all of those things, and their fear was partly based on what he could do to them if they complained.
In 1995, Vanity Fair magazine published an investigation into Fayed, which included allegations of his sexual molestation of (unnamed) employees.
Diana meets Mohamed Al Fayed at Harrods for a breakfast reception in 1996
In the wake of the BBC documentary, Henry Porter, the British editor of Vanity Fair, wrote an article for The Observer explaining how the magazine’s owners, who had gathered even more devastating evidence after Fayed filed a defamation lawsuit, came out after the death of Diana and Dodi, a kind of amicable settlement was agreed with the owner of Harrods, ‘out of respect for the grieving father’.
Before that we lived opposite Henry (on the same street in London), and then on June 1, 1997, at Domenica’s second birthday party, Diana told us that she was planning to accept an invitation from Fayed to spend a few days with him and I urged her not to accept his family off the coast of southern France on his newly acquired yacht, Jonikal.
As I wrote in the Mail on the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death: ‘What I didn’t know at the time was that Fayed – a man long obsessed with establishing connections with the British royal family – had already conceived of the holiday as a opportunity to introduce Diana to his son Dodi, and actually to make them a couple, with marriage being the intended apotheosis of his astonishingly daring plan.’
I now regret that I did not include the accusations of his sexual depravity in the argument I presented to Diana that evening as to why she should not accept Fayed’s invitation.
Instead, I focused on one particular fact: that he had been refused a British passport because of a damning Department of Trade report, following his takeover of Harrods from the House of Fraser in 1987.
Inspectors concluded that Fayed and his brother Ali had “dishonestly represented their origins, their wealth, their business interests and their resources.” They also described Fayed as “a fraudster” and noted: “Fayed is simultaneously capable of believing that he is the victim of vast conspiracies and at the same time concocting fantastic false stories of collusion on the part of others.”
This, as Fayed’s behavior after Diana’s death showed, was both accurate and prophetic.
Anyway, Diana thanked me for explaining all this… but didn’t pay attention. She had previously pointed out to Rosa that after losing her royal protection officers and her title, she felt that Fayed’s major security operation would protect her. How tragically false that turned out to be.
I suspect she also felt that if the Queen had been happy for over a decade to have Fayed sponsor the Royal Windsor Horse Show, so that year after year the Monarch would sit next to the owner of Harrods and be photographed doing so (for some sake). was it so unwise that she received a free holiday from the same man?
This also shows how ridiculous Fayed’s continued claim that he was ‘shunned by the establishment’ was. On the contrary, he was not sufficiently shunned by Buckingham Palace, which continued to grant fully discretionary royal warrants to Harrods until 2000, which he proudly displayed on the outside of his empire.
That fact – of apparent royal support for Harrods – would have only increased his victims’ fears about how Fayed’s status would work against them if they hired him.
So he died last year, at the age of 94, without ever facing justice. The man who spent hundreds of hours interviewing Fayed for an abandoned ghost-written autobiography, Mark Hollingsworth, recalled that Fayed would say, “I believe we’re going to another life and another world, and you’re living with what you have done in life.’
If such a thing is true, at least his victims can console themselves with the fact that Mohamed Fayed’s dark soul is eternally tormented.