Introduction
Survivors’ accounts of abuse suffered at the hands of Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed first surfaced in 1995. Over the subsequent thirty-year period a pattern emerged that’s horribly familiar to anyone who has followed sexual abuse and trafficking cases – accusers silenced with threats of legal action, police inertia, and powerful establishment forces lining up to protect the rich and well-connected.
In spite of brave witnesses coming forward to give evidence in a series of television programmes over the past three decades, survivors still face almost insurmountable barriers in bringing those responsible to justice.
In her second article for Sussex Bylines Isabella* – a founder member of No One Above (NOA), a collective of survivors of organized abuse and trafficking at Fayed-controlled organisations, including Harrods and the Ritz Paris – issues a challenge to the public, the media and government.
For decades, since women first tried to report what was happening around Mohamed Al Fayed, the public has repeated the same questions:
Why didn’t she leave?
Why did she take the money?
Why didn’t she go to the police?
Why agree to the medical testing?
Why speak now?
These questions appear reasonable until you examine their purpose: they direct scrutiny downward, onto the frightened young women and children who were harmed, rather than upward, towards the institutions, enablers, financiers, political allies and law-enforcement bodies that allowed a global exploitation network to operate out of Harrods from 1985 to 2010.
The effects and the lack of accountability and redress are ongoing and continue to harm survivors long after the sale of the store in 2010.
The assumption buried inside these questions is that the failure lies in young people’s reactions, not in the system deliberately built around us.
I was 21 when I was drawn in. At 21, you cannot be expected to out-think a machine constructed by billionaires, facilitated by lawyers, enabled by corporate infrastructure and tolerated by a country that should have protected you. Expecting young women, some as young as 15, to outmanoeuvre what Britain’s most powerful institutions refused to confront is not just unfair. It is absurd.
If this country is ever to understand how this happened and why nothing meaningful has been done, it must stop interrogating the behaviour of vulnerable young women and children and start interrogating the behaviour of the institutions that failed them.
“Why did she take the job?”
Because it was presented as a promotion by a senior Harrods manager. The harm was disguised as opportunity. Grooming doesn’t look like danger; it looks like being “chosen”. It looks like advancement. You cannot blame a 21-year-old for believing in the legitimacy of a job offered by Britain’s most famous department store.
I did not know – I could not have known – that the role assigned to me did not, in fact, exist.
So instead of asking why a young woman accepted a job, ask:
Why did Harrods maintain so many non-productive roles?
What procedures or safeguarding obligations were overlooked to enable this?
How did salaries for staff performing no measurable work pass audit and HR oversight?
Which executives saw the workforce anomalies and chose not to act?
Survivors are yet to receive any answers.
“Why did she agree to the medical testing?”
Because it was engineered to look legitimate and to make young women and girls doubt their own instincts. The medical examination took place inside Harrods itself, conducted by a female company doctor in a clinical room, presented as routine. I was told having a “smear test” was standard procedure. I was not told that they were testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
I was not told it was to ensure I was ’safe’ for sexual exploitation. I was not told that intimate details about my body and hygiene levels would be detailed in a report for my future abuser. I only saw that report when police disclosed it to me in 2024. Its summary read: “Free from infection”.
Women and children left those rooms shaking, violated and confused, because the procedure was designed to destabilise.
Instead of asking why we agreed, ask:
Why was Harrods employing doctors to conduct non-consensual sexual health tests on employees?
Why were the results passed directly to whichever predator had earmarked that woman or child?
How did those same doctors later justify treating injuries and pregnancies resulting from the abuse they enabled?
No 21-year-old assumes a doctor in Britain’s most prestigious store is part of a grooming process.
“Why did she take the money?”
I didn’t. I tried to give it back.
Al Fayed’s rage made refusal impossible. After that, money appeared in my handbag without consent. It was not generosity; it was leverage – the justification he used to take what he believed he had ’paid’ for.
The real question is not why a terrified young woman accepted money.
The question is why a billionaire employer was allowed to use financial coercion as a gateway to violence – and why the banks providing him with weekly high-value cash deliveries raised no red flags, despite statutory reporting duties. .
Britain still has not attempted to answer that.
“Why didn’t she leave?”
I did leave – immediately. Many did. But leaving did not end the danger; it activated new forms of control. Harrods security waited outside my home and followed me for days. HR attempted to force me back with contractual threats.
Other survivors could not leave because coercive control is not theoretical. It is economic, emotional and logistical. Some had no safe place to go. Some were kept in near-captivity. Some were supporting families. Some had passports confiscated. Some were children.
When I ran from Al Fayed’s office, visibly distressed and shaking, I passed secretaries, security, staff – all of whom had seen this before. Nobody stepped in. Nobody helped. In a system where abuse is normalised, escape is not a choice; it is resistance.
So ask this instead:
Why did grown men agree to wait outside a 21-year-old’s home to intimidate her into silence?
Why was Harrods Human Resources department more concerned with paperwork than my safety?
Why did so many employees who witnessed the recruitment, movement and containment of women and girls say nothing?
“Why didn’t she report the abuse?”
After the abuse, the manager who recruited me came to my home and told me that if I went to the police, my family would be harmed – and that Al Fayed would ensure it. At 21, you do not test threats like that. You do not assume the Metropolitan Police will protect you from a man with enormous wealth, political access and decades of establishment connections.
But here is what Britain continues to erase: many survivors did report. Not once. Not sporadically. For four decades – from the late 1970s to the 2000s – women went to the Metropolitan Police. They were ignored, minimised or mishandled. Reports disappeared. Patterns were dismissed. One survivor even raised concerns directly with Margaret Thatcher. Nothing happened.
Other survivors were forced to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements under duress.
So ask this instead:
Why were children and young women forced by Harrods security to sign NDAs, which had been drafted by Harrods lawyers and coordinated by Harrods HR?
Why did the Met, the Crown Prosecution Service, the government, Harrods senior management, all fail to act?
The truth is this:
Some of us could not report. Many did. And those who did were ignored.
This is not victim failure. It is state failure.
“Why speak now?”
We are not speaking because Al Fayed is dead. We are speaking because the structure that enabled him has still not been held accountable.
Harrods still trades under the same corporate entity.
Individuals deeply embedded in the trafficking system are still alive.
Financiers who facilitated logistics and cash flows still profit.
PR firms, lawyers and advisers who helped silence victims still operate.
Politicians aware of concerns remain in public life.
The justice system still offers no meaningful deterrent – not to abusers, nor to institutions that enable them.
And Qatar, which bought Harrods in 2010, has never explained how its £1.5bn acquisition process overlooked (or ignored) decades of allegations, despite the fact that it’s a legal requirement to undertake proper due diligence and that should have exposed the system. Acting then would have allowed silenced victims to speak. Whether its omission was negligence or indifference, the consequences were profound.
So instead of asking why we speak now, ask why accountability still has not begun – and why the absence of action continues to provide a blueprint for the next predator.
The questions Britain must now answer
Survivors are no longer absorbing questions designed to individualise systemic failures. We are asking the questions that fall squarely within the responsibilities of the state:
How have hundreds of consistent accounts, across continents and decades, resulted in so little action?
How can a nation that claims leadership on modern slavery fail to recognise textbook trafficking indicators, in clear breach of domestic and international obligations?
How can the Met review tens of thousands of pages of evidence yet still decline to name all perpetrators, including those still alive?
How can Harrods be permitted to define the narrative without any obligation of truth or disclosure?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are legal ones.
The truth is politically, economically and diplomatically inconvenient. But the cost of silence is borne by survivors – and we are refusing to carry it quietly any longer.
Survivors know the truth – and we are no longer waiting for permission to tell it
Those best placed to give a full account are the people who lived it – not those who ignored warnings, minimised reports or sanitised history after the fact. When survivors speak, we are not speculating. We are reporting from inside the system.
We were there: in the residences, on the yachts, in the jets and helicopters, in the hotels and offices. Those rooms (and the men who moved through them) built the nightmares we still carry. But we are speaking now, and the picture must shift.
No child or young woman should ever have been expected to protect herself from a multinational trafficking operation supported by extraordinary wealth and tacit institutional accommodation. That responsibility lay – and still lies – with the state.
The right question has never been why victims did not act differently. The right question is why no one with authority did.
If Britain’s institutions refuse to confront the full truth and allow corporates to do the same – hiding behind sovereign wealth or a ’redress scheme’ that many have found re-traumatising – then survivors will bring it into daylight themselves.
The people and institutions who once relied on our silence should understand something clearly: the fear is no longer ours.
*Isabella is a Pseudonym. The author is a Fayed/Harrods survivor and a founding member of No One Above (NOA), a survivor-led collective formed by individuals with lived experience of abuse and exploitation connected to Al Fayed, focused on barriers to justice and accountability in cases of abuse. www.nooneabove.org .
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