They say the truth is uncomfortable. Few are more uncomfortable than this: for more than 40 years, some of Britain’s most powerful institutions encountered evidence, warnings and first-hand accounts about Al-Fayed and the system of exploitation around him and yet, again and again, they chose not to stop the harm.
For those of us who lived through it, this isn’t just a story about what Al-Fayed and his associates did. It is a story about what the state decided not to see and what that decision cost.
Al-Fayed’s reach across British public life was not subtle. He courted police, politicians and newspapers with the same energy he used to silence critics and intimidate those who tried to speak. Allegations were minimised, women were discouraged from reporting and accountability was postponed until it entirely disappeared. Seen across decades, the pattern does not look like a series of unfortunate oversights. It looks like a system operating as if its primary function were to protect powerful men from consequence.
The survivors who came forward
One of the most persistent myths about the Al-Fayed case is that survivors have only recently begun to speak. The truth is the opposite. Survivors have been speaking out for decades. That courage should have led to protection. Instead, it was met with silence.
The earliest known allegations stretch from 1977 through to 2013. They arise in different contexts, but survivors’ accounts share recognisable trafficking features: targeting, coercion, control, the use of status and setting to close down escape routes.
In 1986, the teenage daughter of the US ambassador to London reported that Al-Fayed had accosted and abused her. Senior officials in London and Washington, including figures within Margaret Thatcher’s government, were informed. Nothing happened. A year earlier, Al-Fayed had assisted the government during a sterling crisis and helped facilitate a £500 million defence deal with Brunei. The proximity of those timelines does not prove causation, but it makes the silence that followed feel less like oversight and more like calculation.
In 1995, seventeen-year-old Samantha Ramsay reported an assault. Police allegedly told her she would be “added to the pile.” The phrase hints at other women who had tried to report and at a “pile” of pain that was not being acted on. No meaningful action followed. When Samantha spoke publicly, Al-Fayed sued. A teenager reporting assault watched a billionaire put her credibility on trial. Every survivor learnt from that.
Further women tried to report similar experiences. Some were discouraged or warned off by lawyers or Harrods security staff, others found their complaints simply evaporated. Early police files appear to have vanished during digitisation, another disappearance that sits uneasily alongside a history of institutional reluctance. One lost report may amount to negligence. A ‘pile’ of lost reports could suggest something more deliberate, given the strict duties of the police to record and retain sexual offence reports long before digitisation. Survivors have lived long enough inside this story to know that institutions rarely lose what they want to remember.
From 2005, prior to Al-Fayed’s death in 2023, the Met recorded an additional four allegations of rape, 16 of sexual assault and one of trafficking. None resulted in prosecution. For survivors, this was confirmation of what we had already been taught: that the system did not regard our safety as a priority.
When serious allegations are not pursued, the risk does not remain confined to one network, it follows the perpetrator’s access, wealth and power. Al-Fayed bought West Heath School in 1998, giving him proximity to children, including pupils with additional vulnerabilities. Subsequent reporting has included allegations that girls connected to the school were abused, the youngest just 11 years old. This raises profound questions about the consequences of earlier failures to act and the full extent of the harm inflicted through institutional inaction.
Power, proximity and policing
These failures did not occur in a vacuum. In 1997, in the context of providing evidence for the Vanity Fair libel case, former Harrods security officer Bob Loftus described close ties between Harrods security teams and certain Met officers, ties which perhaps help explain how such a pattern of failure could endure. Former staff alleged that police were paid to intimidate whistle-blowers and target employees viewed as ’disloyal’. For workers experiencing or witnessing harm, the idea that security and police might be aligned with the company rather than with victims would have been enough to deter many from ever coming forward.
In 1998, the Evening Standard reported on seven cases where police forces had “[allowed] themselves to be used by Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed in the harassment of ex-employees”. The article describes how, even when the police’s internal corruption service did investigate, no action followed.
Those close ties extended to other linked perpetrators. Earlier reporting suggested that drugs found on Salah Fayed in Scotland were quietly handled with assistance from former Met Commissioner Sir David McNee.
Even when Al-Fayed was interviewed under caution in 2008 and again in 2013, the tone appeared deferential. After the second interview, he publicly expressed outrage that he had been questioned at all.
The Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards is reportedly examining potential historic police corruption relating to Al-Fayed, though survivors have not yet received any updates. Recent IOPC complaints about historic handling of Al-Fayed-related allegations have been passed back to the Met to review its own conduct. For people already living with institutional betrayal, being told that the same institution will assess its own failures feels less like accountability and more like a closed loop. Much like the so-called Harrods redress scheme.
The CPS referrals
The CPS has confirmed that only four cases involving Al-Fayed were referred to it in his lifetime, under several Directors of Public Prosecutions, including Keir Starmer. Prosecutors declined to charge each time. Starmer has since said that the allegations “never crossed [his] desk.”
For survivors, that detail does not reassure. It tells us that even when women overcame fear and shame and reported, even when police did record serious offences, those cases did not travel far within the institution responsible for prosecuting them. A justice system in which serious, repeated allegations against a politically connected and powerful man can fail to “reach the desk” is not a functional system.
In the present time, the contrast between Starmer’s public sympathy for Epstein survivors (triggered by the leaked Mandelson emails) and his silence regarding those affected by Al-Fayed’s network has not gone unnoticed. That contrast is not simply emotional. It tells us who is seen and who is treated as politically strategic to support.
Under national policing standards, consistent patterns of sexual harm should trigger safeguarding checks, risk assessments and linked-victim processes. Those rules exist precisely because isolated reports can sometimes be missed, but repetition should not be. The Al-Fayed exploitation operated as a network. The Met, despite mounting evidence, investigated (or failed to investigate) single incidents. That mismatch was devastating.
The combined effect of policing decisions and CPS inaction was that the available evidence was never tested in court and the wider risk to others was never flagged. When allegations are numerous, consistent and persistent, the continued lack of action becomes extremely difficult to describe as mere negligence. What it resembles instead is a culture in which wealth, status and influence regularly outweighed the experiences and safety of those harmed.
In practice, the Met and the CPS not only failed survivors, they helped preserve Al-Fayed’s power to silence them.
*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 in cases of abuse. www.nooneabove.org.
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