Last Wednesday, the Prime Minister kept his promise, made in February this year, to meet survivors of sexual exploitation by the Fayeds, mostly via their trafficking flagship, Harrods.
The promise was first made after MP Natalie Fleet and Baroness Harman met survivors from campaign group No One Above. When the Prime Minister informed Epstein trafficking survivors that: “In this country, we will not look away. We will not shrug our shoulders”, a baffled Fayed trafficking survivor appealed to Baroness Harman, writing that “we have been abandoned”.
Meanwhile, Epstein survivor Anouska de Georgiou and Fayed survivor Isabella of No One Above compared the cases in a viral campaign. “The parallels are undeniable,” de Georgiou told the BBC Radio 4 World at One in February.
During PMQs a few weeks later, Wendy Chamberlain MP asked the Prime Minister if he would characterise the Fayed case as trafficking and meet survivors. He dodged the first question and reconfirmed the second: yes, he would meet survivors.
And so it was established that meeting survivors would be a substitute for answers.
Trafficking victims prove they were trafficked
During the intervening months, survivors answered the first question – that the case should be characterised as trafficking – by taking their evidence to those more willing than the Met to look at it. No One Above launched a campaign through the Bylines Network to inform survivors about their rights and police duties. Journeying in pairs or solo, women reported their own trafficking to the anti-trafficking NGO Unseen. Some also reported to overseas police forces. This shouldn’t have been necessary, had the Met paid attention to the most clear-cut mass trafficking case since Epstein. Indeed we now know there was trafficking linked to Epstein.
Trafficking victims often struggle against stereotypes borrowed from Hollywood. The Fayeds delivered teenagers in helicopters and shared victims between members of the ring. Their HR departments set up mass STD testing of girls and young women through doctors who forgot their Hippocratic oath. If the Fayed case does not raise red flags for trafficking, what would?
In March, a survivor told the BBC that the police had not taken her trafficking case seriously. In the same story the former head of the Met’s Modern Slavery unit asked why the Met were not investigating the case as trafficking. Three days later the Met announced that it was adding trafficking specialists to the investigation and had interviewed suspects in relation to trafficking charges days before.
In April, in the culmination of survivors’ winter self-reporting, the Home Office confirmed that a former Harrods’ employee was a victim of modern slavery. Further confirmations of Fayed-linked trafficking, in both domestic and cross-border cases, soon followed. The same month, the Met began to refer Fayed victims to the NRM – Britain’s trafficking victim identification mechanism.
Legitimised by Home Office decisions driven by survivor activism not police duty under the law, the press, police and politicians now routinely characterise the Fayed case as involving human trafficking. Contrary to awkward assertions by police now scrambling to identify victims, duties to identify victims and investigate trafficking cases do apply to historical trafficking and have been confirmed in decisions in the European Court of Human Rights.
The recognition of trafficking in the Fayed case did not come about because the Met or the CPS did their jobs. Why not?
Last week, the Prime Minister once again dodged the vital question.
Nothing to see here
We’re still not sure what it’s like to meet the Prime Minister. Seeing him on a video call, flanked by flags, is much like seeing him on TV. Survivors were put on mute. Beforehand, we were assured this was an historic gesture, a meaningful move – and that its alienating limitations were inevitable, given the hundreds dialling in.
Survivors’ questions, gathered days before, were filtered through intermediaries, sharp edges filed off and buffered with niceties. Promised hard-hitting language did not materialise. Nor did the outcome of an assurance given to survivors by Jess Phillips MP, prior to her resignation, that she would ask the NCA, Britain’s top agency for handling serious organised crime, why it had not taken charge of the case – leaving the Met in charge of investigating a trafficking network their officers were allegedly part of. (When Wendy Chamberlain MP reminded Phillips’ replacement Natalie Fleet MP in Parliament this week, the newly appointed Safeguarding minister deflected.)
The Prime Minister began with contrition and empathy. Then he answered each summarised, thematically-compiled and rephrased question with a series of deflections and references to existing or planned policy initiatives sure to strike terror into the heart of the next Mohamed Al Fayed.
We understand, he emphasised, how hard it is to speak as a survivor (especially when you’re on mute). We get it that many survivors don’t trust the Met – but here’s a review of Met progress following the Casey report. We can see that trafficking victim identification has been uneven – we’re working to clarify the advice (for which NOA’s evidence was ignored). We appreciate that the prior Met investigations could have been better – but the IOPC police watchdog must be given time to do its work. And yes, we want to have a discussion on the need to stop wealthy people gagging the press with SLAPPs. There’s no need to intervene. Nothing to see here.
We hear you (but stay on mute).
Survivors were left wondering how any of this would prevent rich, well-connected sex traffickers from targeting their children. The official meeting notes provided a clarification:
“Due to time running out, the meeting moved to the final question. The penultimate question would have been on ensuring trafficking indicators are recognised earlier.”
The Prime Minister promised more meetings and more answers. Hopefully he will fit in the most important question next time.
No one above accountability
The Prime Minister rightly emphasised that Harrods should produce any evidence it controls. We at No One Above shed no tears for an institution that shares responsibility for its history as a trafficking factory. The key word is shares. Harrods and the ghost of Mohamed Al Fayed belong squarely in the crosshairs of blame. But so do living perpetrators and the full chorus of enablers: medical, institutional, political and police.
Unfortunately, the Met’s Cornpoppy investigation has shown little sign that its evidence base spans much further than Fayed’s office lair at Harrods.
Allegations of abuse centered around a Fayed-owned girls’ school seem not to have spurred formal inquiries. Recurring Fayed-linked paedophilia allegations in witness accounts and confirmed by sources to have surfaced in prior inquiries appear not to have been been linked to investigations, while the government shrugs off repeated calls for a Statutory Public Inquiry with the powers to reveal all.
Nor is there any sign that movement of victims via Fayed private aviation facilities, linked to Epstein’s UK trafficking, have been folded into investigations. Or that financial investigations are taking place into a trafficking system largely run through a corporate payroll as urged by the GRETA, the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking monitoring body, in relation to the Fayed case (paragraphs 171-181, evidence submitted by No One Above).
Few in the British press have repeated allegations made against a litigious living member of the Fayed family, or that scion Omar Fayed admitted he knew that his father obstructed justice for victims. Representatives of the Fayed estate, busily siphoning its assets into a Liechtenstein trust, have offered no statement of regret or support to victims numbering at least 500, despite Omar’s gracious acknowledgement that “some of [the allegations] do stack up”.
Many benefited from the concealment of sex trafficking at Harrods, which raises questions why obfuscatory and criminally inconsequential terms like ‘corporate abuse’ and ‘abuse at workplaces’ are used to describe a violent regime of exploitation that even within the Harrods building, saw a bloodied victim locked up in a basement cell and shipped teenage employees abroad to be raped. These misnomers have material effects on the scope and powers of investigations. Only a trafficking investigation has the power to send members of a trafficking network to prison.
The Fayed case must be the last time a gang of sex traffickers escape justice while the enormous social costs of exploitation – from policing and the legal system, to unrecoverable impacts on victims, their families, and society at large – are borne by the British public. While the Met has soft-pedalled an investigation that could have rebuilt survivors’ shattered trust, crucial evidence has been left, unguarded, to rot.
Despite appeals from survivors and politicians, the Prime Minister, relying on the edict of non-interference in police matters, has shrugged. And he has continued to evade questions about how the next elite trafficking ring can be shut down before its architects die of old age.
No One Above will keep demanding answers. Thanks, Bylines Network, for unmuting us.
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