For decades, allegations connected to Mohamed Al-Fayed were not simply ignored; they were contained. Survivors spoke. Patterns emerged. Warnings were raised across years and institutions. The response was suppression.
Today, the strategy is subtler but no less effective. Survivors are no longer dismissed outright. Instead, institutions narrow definitions, fragment investigations and refuse to name the system of exploitation survivors have described with striking consistency. The result is the same: the structure that enabled the abuse remains intact, unexamined and unreformed.
This refusal to name trafficking is not neutral. It is a decision – one that protects institutions rather than survivors.
Fragmenting a system into individuals
The Metropolitan Police have confirmed that they hold statements from 146 survivors. Yet the current investigation focuses on “over five individuals” suspected of facilitating Al-Fayed’s “offending” – language so imprecise it obscures more than it reveals.
Survivors recognise this tactic immediately. It reduces a decades-long, multi-victim pattern to a small number of actors and sidesteps the central question: how such exploitation was organised, financed, enabled and sustained within a major British company over time.
Abuse on this scale cannot plausibly be explained by one perpetrator and a handful of facilitators. Sustained exploitation involving hundreds of victims across multiple decades requires systems. It requires recruitment pathways, access to premises, internal movement, financial infrastructure, legal management, institutional tolerance and repeated failures to intervene.
When an investigation is narrowed to individual acts of abuse, it is not examining the system that enabled those acts – only fragments of their outcome.
Why trafficking is the only framework that can answer the real questions
Framing this case as trafficking is not rhetorical escalation. It is legal accuracy – and investigative necessity.
Only a trafficking investigation has the scope to ask questions a narrow abuse inquiry cannot:
- How could exploitation on this scale be financed without detection, including reported six-figure weekly cash withdrawals?
- How could decades of civil and criminal allegations exist without triggering sustained scrutiny or intervention?
- What did successive boards, directors and senior managers know – and what would standard corporate due diligence have revealed?
- How were settlements, Non-Disclosure Agreements and legal costs approved, managed and justified over time?
- What was the full scope of the exploitation and who beyond the named perpetrator played a role in enabling or sustaining it?
If an investigation is not structured to answer these questions, it cannot explain how this was allowed to happen – nor how it will be prevented from happening again.
Avoiding the word trafficking narrows the inquiry to isolated abuse and shields the architecture of facilitation from scrutiny. It protects institutions, not survivors.
A system in breach: Britain’s failure to apply its own law
Under domestic and international law, the UK has binding obligations to identify, investigate and protect victims of trafficking. These duties are not discretionary. They are triggered by indicators: recruitment, grooming, movement, abuse of power, deception, control, facilitation and exploitation.
Multiple survivor accounts connected to the Harrods network contain such indicators. Yet no known survivor has been referred to the National Referral Mechanism.
This is not a procedural oversight. It is a failure to apply the law as written.
Language matters because law follows language. Naming trafficking would legally require scrutiny of recruitment pathways, logistics, internal movement, harbouring, financial flows, corporate knowledge, document control and institutional response. It would also require scrutiny of past policing decisions.
Avoiding the term avoids the duty.
The international contrast Britain must explain
The contrast with France is stark. French authorities have opened investigations into aggravated trafficking linked to the Ritz Paris, examining near-identical patterns of exploitation.
Yet in communications with survivors, the Metropolitan Police have reframed the French investigation as a sexual abuse matter, rather than acknowledging its trafficking dimensions.
The UK has a legal duty to cooperate with French authorities. Meaningful cooperation requires a shared understanding of the nature of the crimes under investigation. Refusing to acknowledge that France is investigating potential aggravated trafficking undermines transparency, weakens cross-border justice and raises serious questions about what information is being diluted or withheld.
Wilful ignorance is not incompetence
The failures surrounding Al-Fayed were never isolated. They were cumulative and patterned. Survivors reported consistent experiences across decades. Allegations were made and not pursued. Files went missing. Warnings resurfaced repeatedly without resolution. What changed in 2024 was not knowledge of the abuse, but the conditions that had suppressed disclosure – including the belated decision by Harrods to stop enforcing NDAs.
Survivors and whistleblowers have stated that certain police officers actively harassed and attempted to silence victims. These concerns were serious enough to be reported in the press in 1997, after which the Metropolitan Police investigated itself.
Taken together – consistent disclosures, repeated inaction, missing records, alleged intimidation and institutional self-investigation – it becomes increasingly implausible to attribute these outcomes to error. If this were incompetence, the pattern would have broken. It did not. What persisted was avoidance.
What survivors are asking for – and why it matters
Survivors are not demanding new laws. They are asking for compliance with existing ones.
Accountability does not begin with sympathy statements or “lessons learned”. It begins with recognising when survivor testimony meets established legal indicators – and responding accordingly.
This case is not about one man, nor simply about evidential thresholds. It is about whether a multi-decade system of exploitation can operate from within a British company without being named, examined or dismantled.
Harrods is a national emblem. That it became a site of organised exploitation under institutional gaze, without that exploitation being recognised for what it was, strikes at the core of public trust.
Who benefits from silence?
Continuing to label these crimes solely as “historic sexual offences” extends the denial that enabled them.
Naming trafficking does not weaken justice. It strengthens it. It enables scrutiny of systems, scale and sustainability. It asks whether exploitation was organised, repeated, embedded in wider practices and facilitated by institutional failure or benefit.
Refusing to do so avoids scrutiny – of corporations, of policing decisions, and of how power shielded itself from accountability.
If the state can minimise a case this large, this long and this well-documented, there is no guarantee a similar system is not operating elsewhere: within another corporation, another institution, another protected space.
This is not about the past. It is about whether the UK is willing to dismantle the systems that still protect abusers today.
The question Britain must answer
The question facing Britain is no longer whether the information existed. It did. The question is why it was not acted upon – and why the law is still not being applied.
Until trafficking is recognised even when it implicates wealth, prestige or diplomatic sensitivity, the UK will continue to operate a two-tier system: one in which the powerful are buffered by institutional hesitation, and another in which survivors must fight simply to have their experiences accurately named.
After decades of warnings, ignorance is no longer credible. What was lacking was not evidence, but will.
And if the state continues to avoid naming what it already knows, the cost will not be borne by survivors alone – but by the public, who deserve a justice system that protects truth more fiercely than it protects power.
* 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 Fayed, focused on barriers to justice and accountability. www.nooneabove.org
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