Aisha Tukur
One of Mohamed Al Fayed’s brothers also abused women who worked at the Harrods department store, according to three ex-employees who have made allegations including sexual assault and trafficking to the BBC.
The women allege that Salah Fayed abused them in London, the south of France and Monaco between 1989 and 1997. One woman believes she was raped by Salah after she was drugged.
All three women say they were also sexually assaulted or raped by Mohamed Al Fayed, then chairman of the company.
Harrods, which came under new ownership in 2010, said in a statement that the new claims point to the “breadth of abuse” by Al Fayed and “raise serious allegations” against his brother.
Salah Fayed, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010, was one of three Fayed brothers who purchased the luxury Knightsbridge department store in 1985. Mohamed added the Arabic “Al” prefix to his surname some time in the 1970s.
One of the three women, Helen, has waived her right to anonymity. She was 23 and had been working at her “dream” job in Harrods for almost two years when Mohamed Al Fayed raped her in a Dubai hotel room.
Months later, when Mohamed offered her some personal assistant work with his younger brother, she saw it as an escape route – but instead she says she was drugged by Salah and believes she was then raped by him while unconscious.
“He [Mohamed Al Fayed] shared me with his brother,” she says.
Helen is speaking for the first time, after feeling silenced for 35 years, in part because of a Harrods non-disclosure agreement that she was told to sign.
“They’ve stolen a part of me,” she says. “It’s changed the course of my entire life.”
The BBC has also spoken independently to two other women who say they were abused by both Mohamed and Salah.
They say they were trafficked abroad and tricked by Salah into smoking crack cocaine.
“He was trying to get me hooked on crack so he could do whatever he wanted to me,
On a business trip to Dubai and Abu Dhabi in February 1989, she was unnerved to find she had been booked to travel alone with Al Fayed and to stay in his hotel suite, while the rest of his entourage were staying in a separate accommodation.
On the first evening, Helen was in her bathroom getting ready for bed when Mohamed Al Fayed appeared in the mirror behind her without warning.
“It was like out of a horror film,” Helen says. “I was in my nightie and he grabbed my hand, started pulling me out the bathroom. I was really trying to stop him, but I couldn’t.”
She says he took her into his room, pushed her onto the bed and climbed on top of her.
“He raped me that night,” she says.
Helen says she was terrified to find herself so far from home and unable to talk to anyone about what had happened.
She was told to sign a Harrods non-disclosure agreement two months after the trip – the BBC has seen this document. Helen says this, and the fear of reprisal, stopped her from speaking out for more than three decades.
Over the next few months, Helen began making plans to leave Harrods. “I didn’t want to see his face again,” she says.
So when Al Fayed asked her to do some filing work for his brother, Salah, at his Park Lane home, she saw it as a way out.
