How rapist Mohamed Fayed charmed his way into the heart of the British establishment

One of the most damning realities about the accusations of rape against Mohamed Fayed is that they are so unsurprising.

Fayed was a serial sexual abuser hiding in plain sight who managed to inveigle his way into the heart of the British Establishment using the trusty tools of wealth and fame.

In common with Jimmy Savile, he inserted himself into the lives of unwitting senior Royal family members, providing an invisible layer of protection against any victim who might dare to go public.

Where Savile relied on the fact that his victims were children, unlikely to have the courage to expose him and even less likely to be believed, Fayed used the sheer menace of a private security team and an army of lawyers to silence his adult prey.

In both cases, their sexual abuse was an open secret. Savile groped women on live television, while Fayed did it in his office in front of other staff.

Even before some of the victims who have now spoken to the BBC were employed by Fayed, his habitual sexual harassment of employees, including groping their breasts and bottoms in his office, had been extensively catalogued by the biographer Tom Bower.

In his 1998 book, Fayed, Bower described how the magnate would select attractive Harrods staff to be reassigned to his private office, then send them off for gynaecological examinations by private doctors before taking them to his flat in Paris where he would turn up in their bedroom and pester them for sex.

One former in-house lawyer, Francesca Armitage, told Bower that Fayed had taken her to Paris and once she was in bed came into her room in his dressing gown and sat on the bed. She dashed into the bathroom and locked herself inside until he left. Days later he summoned her to his London home in the evening for “work” reasons and sexually assaulted her on his sofa.

Fayed noisily threatened to sue Bower, but his accusations of libel never came to anything because Bower’s revelations were demonstrably true.

By the time Bower’s book came out, Fayed had very publicly courted the Royal family, using Harrods’s sponsorship of the Royal Windsor Horse Show to secure a seat next to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip and having Prince and Princess Michael of Kent to stay at his Surrey estate.

Raine, Countess Spencer, Princess Diana’s stepmother, was given a seat on the board of Harrods. There is no suggestion that any member of the Royal family knew of any allegations of sexual assault or harassment at the time, but Fayed was controversial because of his shady business dealings.

While Queen Elizabeth II appeared to have his number (she declined an invitation to visit the Villa Windsor, the former home of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson near Paris which he owned, and sent her private secretary to take back objects that belonged to the Royal family), Princess Diana famously – and fatefully – accepted his hospitality, which led to a brief romance with his son Dodi and their death in one of Fayed’s chauffeured cars in 1997.

Fayed had attracted the suspicion of governments for decades. In the 1960s he was put under surveillance by the CIA after he befriended the Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier: the CIA’s assessment of him was that he was “friendly and evil at the same time”.

Then in the 1990s, the Government refused Fayed’s obsessive pleas to be granted a British passport, deeming that he was “not a fit and proper person to be given citizenship” after a Department of Trade and Industry report called him out as a liar.

He knew, though, that money and a public profile were powerful buffers against the threat of exposure, and had for decades cosied up to those who could be useful in that respect.

Donald Trump was among those who accepted invitations to his country estate in Oxted. Douglas Hurd, then foreign secretary, took his family to enjoy Fayed’s lavish hospitality. Celebrity guests included Kirk Douglas, Barry Humphries, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis.

Michael Jackson was among those Fayed counted as his friends, and when the pop star died in 2009 Fayed put up a statue of him outside Fulham Football Club, which Fayed owned at the time. There is no suggestion any of these guests know about Fayed’s sexual misdeeds.

Fayed was a chancer who had built his considerable wealth by lying about how much money he had to secure backing from others. He then turned this imagined fortune into a real one by buying and selling businesses.

Prestige purchases such as Harrods, House of Fraser and the Paris Ritz were designed to buy him respectability and a seat at the top table of society, which in turn gave him all the protection he needed to abuse women at will.

As some of the rape victims who spoke to the BBC have attested, they kept their ordeals to themselves because they were terrified of the consequences of speaking out or going to the police.

In a society where fewer than one in six rape victims go to the police and less than three per cent of rape complaints lead to a conviction, it is entirely understandable that any woman faced with the wealth and power of a man like Fayed would feel it was pointless to after him.

As one woman said: “I’m petrified of someone who is no longer alive.”

Another woman did summon the courage to report to the police a sexual assault at his Park Lane apartment after a job interview. He was interviewed by the Metropolitan Police in 2013 and the case was reopened in 2015 but no charges were brought (another woman went to police in 2018 but was told that Fayed had dementia and was too frail to be prosecuted).

Fayed felt so invincible that when the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens was tasked with investigating Fayed’s allegations that Diana and Dodi were murdered, he invited the ex-policeman to meetings in Harrods to discuss the progress of the inquiry, and even tried to give him gifts of Viagra and a bull’s testicle.

Lord Stevens later described him as “a character”.