Mohamed Fayed sexually assaulted me in front of his children, says survivor

It is 33 years since Catherine and Natacha left Harrods, and more than a year since their abuser Mohamed Fayed died, yet one emotion still grips them as they talk about their former employer: fear.

It takes immense courage for anyone who has suffered sexual abuse to talk about it in public, but these brave women, who were among the victims of Fayed who took part in last week’s BBC documentary unmasking him as a serial rapist, also had to overcome the very genuine belief that they might be putting themselves in danger by speaking out.

So chilling were the threats he made to them and their families to silence them that to this day they worry that someone might come after them.

“It’s 30 years later,” says Catherine, who is now in her early 50s, “but we still have the same feeling of that level of threat to our safety. I genuinely had to sit down and think, do I want to be that exposed? Will they come after me?”

Almost 40 women are now involved in legal action against Harrods and around 60 more have been in touch with lawyers to say they, too, were victims of a man we now know to have been a prolific serial sex attacker.

Fayed was so brazen about the fact that he was molesting and raping young female employees that one former manager at the store told the BBC that anyone who worked in a senior position for Fayed who claims not to have known what he was up to is a liar.

He even sexually assaulted Catherine in front of three of his own children and then tried to force himself on her when they were asleep in a nearby room.

Natacha says she was sexually assaulted by him on a weekly basis whenever she was alone with him in his office.

Neither of them, in common with all of the other victims – or survivors as they prefer to be termed – had anyone they could turn to for help within Harrods, whose monstrous owner used money and menace to shut down any attempt to get a message to the outside world about what really went on inside the world’s most famous department store.

Fayed never paid for his crimes, despite being questioned by police on several occasions, and the process of seeking justice for his victims is only just beginning.

On Friday Natacha joined other survivors at a press conference in London where the legal team, led by Dean Armstrong KC, said Harrods must be held accountable for a “system” within the business that enabled Fayed to abuse women at will.

Employed as ‘potential prey’

Natacha and Catherine say they “come as a pair” and were only able to speak out thanks to the strength they draw from each other. Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph after the press conference in a hired function room on the edge of Hyde Park, they are exactly the sort of people you would imagine Harrods would have hired: well-spoken, well-mannered, immaculately turned out.

They innocently thought the same when they were hired in 1990, but they now have no doubt they were hired not as model employees, but as potential prey. They tell of a modus operandi that was repeated down the decades by Fayed to ensure a steady conveyor belt of victims who were hired, befriended, groomed, molested and then, in some cases, raped.

“I was a country bumpkin,” says Natacha, as she describes the naive 19-year-old she was when she fell into Fayed’s orbit. “I had a rural upbringing walking dogs, riding horses, not streetwise. I knew [Fayed] was chairman of Harrods but I didn’t know of his reputation.”

Natacha and Catherine, who was also 19, were signed up with the same recruitment agency, which sent them both for interviews as assistants to Fayed’s personal assistant within months of each other in 1990. Both were slim, blonde and pretty, and both now suspect the agency sent them to Harrods knowing that was what Fayed preferred. Both unexpectedly found themselves being interviewed by Fayed himself.

Asked to describe Fayed’s office, Catherine comes up with one word: “Gold.” Natacha says: “That sense of opulence and grandeur was quite overwhelming at that age.” Each was hired straight away, believing they had landed their “dream job”, says Natacha, and for the first few months all seemed well, apart from the fact that there was precious little to do. “We spent a lot of our time doodling,” says Natacha.

Fayed “was like an uncle or a father”, she adds, telling her to call him Papa. “We were lulled into a false sense of security. He would say that ‘if you do your job well you will be part of our family and you will want for nothing’. He was charismatic, he put you at ease.”

Catherine says: “He had his own children. He had two daughters. He was married. Even if you’re grown up you don’t suspect someone like that [of being a threat].”

Shockingly, however, Catherine was to discover that Fayed was even prepared to use his young children as a means of disarming his victims and catching them off guard.

Four or five months into her employment, she was asked to go to Fayed’s mansion in Oxted, Surrey, to help his daughter Camilla with piano lessons one Saturday.

‘It almost excited him more to see you petrified’

“When I got there he introduced me to his children and his wife,” says Catherine. “He made you feel that if you worked for him, you were like family.”

She was led to a huge playroom that contained a piano but also a ball pit, “and out of nowhere he picked me up, put his hand right up my skirt and sort of groped, and threw me in. I remember being submerged and resurfacing and all of them were laughing at me.

“I felt a sense of humiliation, of ‘what just happened?’, it all happened so quickly.

“It almost excited him more to see you petrified or terror-struck. The more vulnerable you were, the more he seemed to get some satisfaction or pleasure out of it.”

Catherine says the sexual assault happened in front of three of Fayed’s children after his wife had left the room.

Later that night she had dinner with the children’s nanny and went to bed in a room down the corridor from the children’s bedrooms. “He came into the room and tried to get into bed with me and assault me,” she says. “I resisted and he didn’t like that at all, he was angry. He said something along the lines of maybe next time you’ll want it or welcome it.”

Terrified, and trapped in the country mansion with no means of fleeing, she used her pager to contact Natacha, who told her to drag a chest of drawers across the door. The next morning she was put on a train back to London as though nothing had happened.

Like other victims hand-picked to work in Fayed’s office, Natacha was sent for a medical when she joined Harrods, during which she was subjected to a gynaecological examination and tested for Aids and sexually transmitted diseases without her consent. She was never given the results, but we know from other victims that the results would routinely be sent straight to Fayed. She was, she says, being “checked for my purity”.

Private meetings with Fayed were initially above board, but then came the forced kisses and the groping that would happen without warning. “It was so quick,” she says. “It wasn’t like he’s gonna sidle up really slowly – he would grab you.” She says that “the fear left me paralysed”.

Despite working in the same office, Natacha and Catherine were not allowed to chat to each other at work, they were forbidden from taking lunch at the same time and never once left work together. If they wanted to communicate at work they had to secretly pass notes to each other, making sure they were not spotted by Fayed’s PA.

They did, though, pluck up the courage to meet up at weekends, becoming firm friends, though they never told any of their colleagues they were socialising together for fear that it would be reported back to Fayed. Anyone who talked, of course, might discover they were not the only victim, and Fayed was no doubt anxious to avoid that happening.

“We had to keep our meetings very secret,” says Natacha, “because you didn’t know who to trust. To us it was obvious others had succumbed [to the Fayed regime] because they had store cards, they had cars, Cartier jewellery, expensive clothes.”

‘He was very scary’

It is easy for anyone hearing the victims’ stories to wonder what stopped them from simply quitting their jobs.

Part of the answer, they say, is that they needed “to pay the rent”. Neither came from well-off families, and Catherine had lost her father when she was a child – as Fayed knew because he had probed her about it in her job interview and “probably saw a vulnerability, not having a father figure”. Natacha says that despite everything “I still wanted that job to be the job I thought I was going for”. On top of that, of course, was the fear.

“He turned,” says Catherine, her voice trembling and tears starting to form in her eyes, “and he was very scary. The tone in which he threatened you left you in no uncertain terms that he meant it, and he would send his security, and they did know where we lived, and if we ever said anything, not only would we never work in London again but they would come and find us.”

One victim has even described how John MacNamara, Fayed’s head of security, told her that she was a girl all alone in London and “someone could jump out of the bushes at you or you could have a sudden accident”.

None of the women regarded such talk as idle threats, hence the reluctance of Catherine and Natacha to take part in the BBC documentary when they were approached.

Both of them were so afraid of Fayed when they left Harrods that they left the country for lengthy periods because they no longer felt safe in London or even the UK.

In Natacha’s case, the end came when she was invited to Fayed’s Park Lane apartment for what she was told was a job review, and when she got there the door was locked behind her and Fayed’s bedroom door was open with sex toys on view.

She sat on the sofa and Fayed “pushed himself onto me”. They fell to the floor with him on top of her and she managed to kick herself free before running for the door. He laughed at her and told her that if she ever breathed a word to anyone, she would never work in London again, adding that he knew where her family lived. She never went back to the office.

In Catherine’s case she was sacked after she pushed Fayed away, hard, when “he tried to go up my blouse”. Both women were gone within eight to 10 months of starting.

Yet the ordeal did not end there. Natacha describes losing confidence and going abroad to find work, where she struggled with male bosses and for a time struggled with male relationships, though happily she says she is “all good now”.

‘I believed I was gonna get hunted down’

Catherine left the country to go travelling because: “I really, truly believed I was gonna get hunted down.” She suffered “a lot of nightmares”, she says.

For other women, the damage done by Fayed went even deeper. One woman was subjected to threats over the phone even after she left Harrods, became suicidal and had to spend six months in a psychiatric hospital. She was unable to form romantic relationships and missed out on the chance of having a family as a result of the trauma that Fayed had left her with.

Catherine and Natacha, who have waived their right to anonymity, agreed to this interview, and the BBC documentary, on the basis that their surnames would not be used. They do not want details of their current circumstances or even their employment history to be made public because they fear that someone might be able to use that information to find them. Someone with links to Fayed.

They insist that the road to justice goes straight through the doors of Harrods, rather than via any individuals who might have enabled Fayed’s internal human trafficking operation or helped keep it quiet.

Harrods was bought by the Qatar Investment Authority in 2010, but barrister Mr Armstrong has a ready answer for anyone who suggests the post-Fayed Harrods should not be accountable for what went before.

“If you buy a house it’s your obligation to check the rafters aren’t rotten and the roof isn’t about to fall in,” he says. Fayed’s sexual abuse of employees was well documented as early as the 1990s, not least by Tom Bower in his 1998 biography, which detailed the medical examinations, the molestation and the threats.

Harrods says it has accepted “vicarious liability” for Fayed’s conduct, that it has reached settlements with the “vast majority” of people who have approached it since 2023 and that it is now “a very different organisation” from the one presided over by Fayed.

Mr Armstrong is not satisfied. “They say they didn’t know about al-Fayed’s behaviour until 2023. That is simply not true.”

The victims’ legal team now includes Gloria Allred, the US attorney who has represented the victims of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby, among others. She says that Fayed’s abuse was “not a secret” when Harrods was sold and was “widely known by its employees”. The victims, she says, need “meaningful accountability for what they have suffered”.

The path to justice, then, may be coming into focus after women spent decades suffering in silence. The fear, though, may never go away.

Neither woman had told their families the full details of what happened to them before the BBC documentary was broadcast, and talking about it clearly drags up memories that they do not want to revisit.

“I’m sorry if I’m a bit intense,” Catherine unnecessarily says. “When you go back over it, you realise just how scary it was. You were in a complete terror-struck zone of absolute fear.”