Something has shifted in recent weeks in how the UK is publicly discussing the abuse linked to Mohamed Al-Fayed.
Voices across politics, law and the media are now beginning to identify what Harrods survivors have been describing for decades – a system that facilitated widespread human trafficking. Will this be enough to change the terms of the current police investigation?
Last week the Metropolitan Police Service confirmed that three suspects have been interviewed under caution on suspicion of aiding and abetting rape and sexual assault, assisting the commission of sexual offences, and human trafficking for sexual exploitation. These interviews are a significant development and a welcome step. They reflect the detailed testimony survivors have provided over many months.
However, the public statement accompanying those interviews continues to frame the investigation largely around individuals who may have “facilitated or enabled offending by Mohamed Al-Fayed”. While the inclusion of suspected trafficking offences is important, the Metropolitan Police have not yet publicly indicated that a formal trafficking investigation examining the wider systems involved is underway.
The trafficking framework matters because it requires investigators to examine not only individual assaults, but also the systems, facilitators and financial structures that enabled the exploitation to continue over many years. And while it appears that the Met are still reluctant to initiate such an investigation, influential voices have already begun to publicly recognise the scale of the abuse that survivors have been describing for so long.
Abuse should be investigated as human trafficking
A former head of the Metropolitan Police’s modern slavery unit, Phil Brewer, told the BBC that the abuse linked to Mohamed Al-Fayed should be investigated as human trafficking. The independent victims’ adviser for Harrods said the same on BBC Radio 4. Anti-trafficking charity Unseen UK warned that the parallels with the case of Jeffrey Epstein are deeply troubling and should serve as a reminder that trafficking can flourish where wealth, power and status go unchecked. Former Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal wrote that Al-Fayed’s Harrods could be “Britain’s Epstein Island”.
In Parliament, MP Paul Kohler described the case as a “multi-perpetrator, multi-jurisdictional, multi-decade trafficking outrage”, while Labour MP Natalie Fleet called it “Britain’s Epstein”.
For those of us who lived through the abuse linked to Mohamed Al-Fayed, none of this feels new. What does feel new is hearing it acknowledged so plainly, as for decades survivors were handled carefully rather than heard properly. We were told the picture was “complex”, that connections were speculative, that events were historic, civil, reputational — not systemic. There was always a reason to narrow the lens just enough for the systems and structure that facilitated the abuse to disappear.
Long before the mainstream press caught up, survivors were speaking through the Bylines Network, which supported and platformed us when it was unfashionable to do so — even when doing so carried legal and financial risk. They gave survivors space to speak in our own words and to describe the recurrent patterns clearly: not as gossip, not as grievance, but as structure.
For that seriousness we remain profoundly grateful, because being taken seriously is transformative when you have been systematically diminished.
But the progress that we are now seeing comes at a cost. Survivors have had to do the work that should rightly have been undertaken by those institutions tasked with investigating serious crime. They have had to become investigators, advocates and public witnesses to their own trauma – in some cases seeking justice abroad where the UK failed to act. As so often in cases involving abuse by the rich and powerful, the burden of forcing the system to launch a proper investigation has fallen on the shoulders of those who have been most harmed by it.
Through the survivor-led organisation No One Above (NOA), evidence has been compiled, patterns documented and submissions made to Parliament, international human rights bodies and domestic oversight institutions.
This should not have been necessary.
Britain’s Epstein
With more than 400 women reporting consistent accounts of exploitation linked to Mohamed Al-Fayed, the scale alone should have triggered serious institutional attention long ago. The 21 women and girls who bravely came forward during Al-Fayed’s lifetime should have been taken seriously at the time.
In other contexts, the patterns described by survivors — recruitment through employment, control within a workplace environment, isolation, coercion, and movement domestically and across jurisdictions — would immediately have raised questions about trafficking. Survivors have been asking for years why the same legal framework has not been fully applied here.
Speaking publicly about the most intimate violations of one’s life is not something anyone does lightly. Yet survivors have done so because silence allowed those institutions responsible for action to pretend the structure was invisible for decades. That avoidance – that silence – can feel as though the testimony of hundreds of survivors is being measured against the comfort of powerful men — and found to be inconvenient.
Now, largely through the persistence of survivors rather than the institutions tasked with investigating serious crime, the national conversation appears to be shifting and political attention is beginning to follow the evidence survivors have been presenting for years.
Will the Met investigation be comprehensive enough?
The central public-interest question now is straightforward: is the Met investigation structured to test the full breadth of allegations reported by more than 400 women?
That includes examining, where supported by evidence, potential organised exploitation, facilitation, systemic enablement, financial strands and cross-border elements reflected in survivor testimony and public reporting.
Survivors hope the recent development signals the beginning of a broader and more comprehensive investigation examining the full scope of what occurred. This would include examining private aviation, financial activity, all perpetrators and institutional knowledge.
Paul Kohler MP has asked whether sufficient resources will be committed to investigating this “human trafficking scandal”. Natalie Fleet MP has worked to facilitate engagement between survivors and government, and the Prime Minister has now indicated that he is willing to meet with survivors.
That matters. But survivors have learned to measure progress carefully.
While NOA has welcomed efforts to facilitate such a meeting, any engagement must be meaningful rather than symbolic. Survivors are prepared to engage constructively, but only where there is a genuine willingness to address the issues being raised.
NOA has asked the Prime Minister to confirm whether he is prepared to support an independent assurance that the investigation is appropriately resourced and structured for allegations of this scale. NOA does not seek to interfere with operational policing. Ensuring that survivors and the public can have confidence in the integrity of the process is, however, a matter of legitimate public interest. The question is no longer whether the allegations are serious enough to warrant scrutiny. The question is whether the government’s stated commitment that no one is above the law will be applied when the individuals and institutions involved are powerful.
Change requires “deeds, not words”
Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips has recently said that change requires “deeds, not words”. Survivors are entitled to expect the government to show that there is meaning behind those words.
The past few weeks have shown something important. When institutions hesitate, survivors do not disappear. They organise. They document. They keep speaking until the truth becomes impossible to ignore.
Recognition, however, is only the beginning. Accountability still has to follow. The investigation must test the full scope of what women have reported. Institutions must be examined honestly. Safeguards must be built so that structures capable of enabling exploitation cannot operate again under the protection of wealth and power.
While it is welcome that respected legal figures, MPs and national media are now acknowledging what survivors have long described, it also raises an uncomfortable reality: it should never have taken this much work from survivors to bring the country to this point.
For many survivors, this moment carries a complicated mixture of validation and exhaustion. The country is finally beginning to see the outline of what survivors have been describing all along.
The question now is whether the institutions responsible for justice are prepared to confront the full extent of what that outline reveals.
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