For almost 200 years, members of London’s high society – queens, princes and princesses among them – have turned to Harrods for their designer clothes, handbags and jewellery, as well as high-end homeware and gourmet foods.
The luxury department store is known around the world for its famous clientele, its opulent Victorian interiors and its upmarket goods. But for decades, the expensive art deco facade hid a dark underbelly. Last year, the BBC revealed that Harrods’ former owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, an Egyptian billionaire who died aged 94 in 2023, allegedly abused, harassed and raped hundreds of young women and teenage girls who worked for him between the late 1970s and the 2010s.
Harrods, which Al Fayed bought in 1985 and sold to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund for £1.5bn in 2010, responded with an apology to the victims, condemning “the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated”. In March this year, the company set up a compensation scheme “to provide survivors with a trauma-informed alternative to litigating against Harrods”. By July, it reported that more than 100 of the 200-plus alleged survivors had applied for redress.
But several victims have told openDemocracy of serious concerns with the scheme, which they say wrongly portrays Al Fayed as the sole perpetrator, allowing Harrods to avoid responsibility for its own role in his alleged crimes. The women have accused the company of “trafficking” them, claiming they were hired for legitimate shop-floor positions and then transferred into non-existent office roles created solely to deliver them to Al Fayed. They believe this process involved dozens of other members of Harrods staff, including those in senior roles, who enabled and were complicit in their abuse.
One woman who says she was “given a fake job in order to be abused” is Isabella*, who told openDemocracy: “I was recruited under the guise of a job that didn’t exist, only to be exploited. This conduct met the international definition of trafficking under the [UN’s] Palermo Protocol and would be chargeable today under the [UK’s] Modern Slavery Act.”
Isabella was 20 when she was hired for a summer job in Harrods’ womenswear department in the 1990s. At first, she spent her days surrounded by designer clothes, serving the wealthy shoppers who’d passed through the overpowering perfume department to ascend the central escalator, watched by busts of Egyptian pharaohs that are designed to bear a frightening resemblance to Al Fayed.
Then her manager told Isabella she was being moved to the “chairman’s office”. “I was a temp,” Isabella told openDemocracy. “I assumed they were moving me to that office because they needed staff there. But when I got to the office, there was no job for me. I did nothing all day.”
In her new role, Isabella was given random tasks that were often unrelated to Harrods’ operations, such as buying a CD for Al Fayed’s daughter. “I was a bit confused, but as it was the first time I had worked in an environment like Harrods, I thought this was just how things worked,” she recalled. The atmosphere was hostile. “No one spoke. It was an environment which discouraged conversation or interaction, other than what was absolutely required.”
Isabella told openDemocracy how Fayed would arrange meetings with her, sometimes three or four times a week, during which he criticised her appearance, pressured her into accepting money and persistently urged her to visit his luxury apartment at 60 Park Lane, one of London’s most expensive streets. She refused his invitations, but it didn’t matter. Al Fayed assaulted her in the Harrods offices instead.
A structure for abuse
“The abuse wasn’t just about one man, or a few rogue employees,” Isabella said. “It was enabled and sustained by the corporate structure itself. Harrods seems to have created the conditions that put women like me in front of a predator – and then concealed the abuse that followed. It was the whole system.”
That system kicked into gear as soon as Isabella was moved into Al Fayed’s office, she said. Within a week of starting her new role, she was sent for a medical examination by the Harrods occupational health department. Staff were told everyone working in his office needed the tests, but Isabella found the medical examination “extremely odd and horrible”.
As the examination became increasingly intimate, Isabella asked Dr Wendy Snell, the private clinician who was assessing her, why it was needed. Snell, who died in 2022, assured her that a free medical was a “perk” of working at Harrods. It is not known whether men at the company were also given these medicals and, if so, whether they were as intimate as those the women survivors report having to undergo.
Isabella’s test results were not shared with her, but given directly to Al Fayed. Years later, she would access the medical notes and learn that she, like many other victims, had been secretly checked for sexually transmitted diseases to ensure Al Fayed could abuse her without risking his own sexual health. The notes described her as “free from signs of infection”.
The system had procedures in place for the aftermath of an assault, too, Isabella told openDemocracy. While she never returned to work after the abuse, she said that days later she was visited at home by her former manager, who warned her that Al Fayed would ruin her father’s business if she spoke out. She was also followed by Al Fayed’s security staff. “It was a very intimidating experience,” she said. “I was a young woman being followed from my home by middle-aged men, who would not respond when I tried to engage with them.”
Isabella believes there were many other Harrods-appointed staff involved in Al Fayed’s abuse. These include recruitment and HR departments, which created roles to place young women in his reach; the chairman’s office and senior personal assistant teams (some of whom were victims themselves) that scheduled his appointments and managed the constant turnover of women; the in-house finance and accounting teams that processed salaries and pay-offs; as well as the external law firms that drafted non-disclosure agreements, launched lawsuits known as SLAPPs, which are designed to intimidate and silence, and worked with PR firms to put journalists off the story.
Many of Al Fayed’s alleged victims agree with Isabella. “Fayed could not have done any of the things he did as a sole individual,” said Alison*, who says he abused her when she was 22. “In my opinion, he needed the infrastructure of Harrods to operate within, and he needed people within the business to facilitate the whole system – be that HR, security, senior directors – so many people who were aiding and abetting this process that he had. He could not have done it on his own.”
Isabella and Alison’s experiences are supported by ongoing research, titled ‘Powerful Perpetrators’, on sexual violence and misconduct by Dr Natasha Mulvihill, an associate professor in criminology at the University of Bristol. “Individuals like Al Fayed do not act alone,” Mulvihill told openDemocracy. “There is always a network of people around them who are witnesses, facilitators or even co-offenders. Paradoxically, they can operate in plain sight: re-framing and normalising their activity so that organisations are collectively complicit.”
While Harrods told openDemocracy it accepts “vicarious responsibility” for the abuse, the survivors say its compensation scheme overlooks its own role and legal failings, such as its duty to provide a safe working environment – a legal requirement since 1974. Shanta Sundarason, who was 23 when she was abused by Al Fayed and has waived her right to anonymity to speak out, told openDemocracy that “the Harrods redress scheme is way too narrow, and it does not address the enablers”. She added: “This could not have happened if there were no enablers. His enablers helped him to get me into his office [where she was assaulted].”
The survivors also say the company has failed to recognise that the alleged crimes could meet the UN’s internationally accepted definition of trafficking: “The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means [...] of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power [...] for the purpose of exploitation”.
“From my perspective, Harrods felt like a corporate trafficking system – not on the margins, but embedded in the very structure of the institution,” Isabella said. “It seems to me that, but for the acts and omissions of the Harrods corporate structure in facilitating and concealing Al Fayed’s conduct, and its failure to discharge its duty of care to protect those within its premises, the abuse could not have occurred on the scale or with the persistence that it did.”
Medical versus non-medical
Alleged survivors have until next March to apply for compensation under Harrods’ scheme, which is being run by the company’s legal firm, MP Legal. But several women have told openDemocracy that the scheme overlooks the trauma that many victims have suffered by requiring them to undergo a medical assessment by a scheme-appointed psychiatrist if they want to access the higher tier of compensation.
Those willing to undergo the assessment will be able to claim up to £200,000 in general damages, compared to £110,000 for those who opt for an alternative route to redress. In addition, those who take the so-called ‘medical pathway’ will be able to apply for compensation for past treatment costs and up to £150,00 for a work impact payment, where their career path has been severely impacted by the assault. Neither will be available for those who don’t want to be assessed. Payments of up to £10,000 for “wrongful testing” in recognition of the medical abuse suffered are available on both the ‘medical’ and ‘non-medical’ pathways.
“Given what so many women have experienced,” Alison said, “having any medical expert appointed by Harrods [conduct a medical assessment] feels so unethical and potentially hugely retraumatising.” She pointed out the process would be particularly triggering for “those who had to undergo medical procedures through Harrods representatives”.
Isabella said she remembers how, after her medical test by Dr Snell, she felt “traumatised and like I had been really violated”. For some survivors, the covert sexually transmitted disease testing left lifelong mental scars. This was the case for Eve*, who was assaulted by Al Fayed while working for his family in 2011, when he was 82 and she was in her twenties.
“It was full on, up on the bed, take your pants off, speculum inserted, full-on gynae exam,” Eve said. “I was so embarrassed, I wasn’t prepared for that. The doctor was asking me if I was sexually active. She was asking if I had any problems with sex.”
The process was so traumatic that Eve has not since been able to have regular cervical smear tests, the routine procedure for detecting cervical cancer. “This situation has put my life at risk as I have such a mental block,” she said. “I cannot bring myself to go because of the shame I felt that day.”
A Harrods spokesperson confirmed to openDemocracy that “the [redress] scheme offers a panel of consultant psychiatrists, and it is important to note, as there have been misleading claims by media in regards this matter, that this panel includes experts nominated by the leading personal injury law firms acting for survivors. The consultant psychiatrists are instructed jointly and provide all the information and reports simultaneously to both parties as jointly instructed consultant psychiatrists.
“While issuing claims for personal injury (such as sexual abuse) in England and Wales does require a medical report from a medical expert, the scheme has been designed expressly to include a ‘non-medical pathway’. This provides a route to compensation, in response to survivor feedback, for sexual abuse without the need for any medical assessment or sharing of records.”
But survivors point out that Harrods’ owners, the Qatar Investment Authority, which had an estimated value of $557bn as of last month, did not need to mirror England and Wales’ official Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority compensation scheme in creating a tiered system for compensation reliant on a potentially trauma-inducing medical assessment – it chose to do so.
Women also told us how the scheme’s two-tier format means that victims who, for whatever reason, did not disclose the abuse in the past, including to doctors, or can not demonstrate psychiatric impacts or loss of work, would not be able to access the higher compensation amounts.
“The tiered scheme – it is awful,” said Sundarason. “It is very degrading. I think for Harrods to classify it like that is so wrong. Every case is different, and they should treat every woman differently.”
Many victims believe that they will not see justice from any redress scheme that is in “the perpetrator’s hands”, as Isabella described it. Some flagged concerns with Harrods’ appointing Jasvinder Sanghera, known for her work on violence against women, as an independent survivor’s advocate for the redress scheme. Sanghera’s role is to respond to victims’ concerns and provide feedback to the scheme, but as Sundarason said, “we worry that everything we say goes back to Harrods.” openDemocracy approached Sanghera’s office for comment, but did not get a response.
The women want to see the introduction of a new independent, statutory redress scheme that is not divided into medical and non-medical pathways, removes Harrods’ appointees from the process, and recognises the systemic complicity in the abuse, as well as Al Fayed’s own violent actions. Such a scheme, they feel, could provide a structure for future victims of systemic abuse to access support and justice.
“Survivors are calling for accountability for the full continuum of harms committed against us,” Isabella said. Alison agreed, saying: “Because of my mistrust in Harrods in general, I met the scheme with that cloak of mistrust, as that is how my relationship is with Harrods. That may sound biased, but it is based on my experience of being involved with them.”
Another serious flaw in the existing redress scheme is exposed by Eve’s experience: she is not entitled to any compensation from Harrods for her assault. The redress scheme is limited to victims who were abused before Al Fayed sold Harrods in May 2010, which is particularly troubling given that he stayed on as an honorary chairman at the store for six months after the sale.
Eve told openDemocracy that although she was assaulted by Al Fayed in 2011, Harrods staff had laid the groundwork for her attack in the months prior. “I was still medically examined by a Harrods doctor, and sent to the exam by Harrods bodyguards,” she said. She also believes she was surveilled by Al Fayed in the run-up to the assault.
Limiting the scheme to women who were victimised before 2010, Eve said, also fails to recognise how Fayed’s power and wealth were strengthened through his relationship to Harrods. Without that power and wealth, she would never have been hired by his family or exposed to his violence.
“It’s not just the person, it’s the banks that funded him, the people who enabled him, it was the whole network,” she said. “The perception is that it was one man, he groped a few girls. It was a systemic, corrupt machine. I was not assaulted because I was there. I was assaulted because I went through a process: the recruiter, the interview, the medical, the security check, the NDA, the bodyguard. These were not random assaults sporadically, this was a linear approach.”
This was echoed by Isabella. “What’s clear from survivor accounts is that this wasn’t an isolated tactic but part of a wider pattern: women being deceived, coerced, and abused in ways that show the classic red flags of trafficking,” she said.
In a statement, Harrods told openDemocracy: “The purpose of the Harrods Redress Scheme is to offer financial and psychological support to survivors of sexual abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Fayed, for which Harrods has accepted vicarious liability. We have always been clear that the scheme may not suit every single claim, and control is in the hands of survivors who can determine, at any point, to seek alternative routes of redress such as litigation or actions against other parties, such as the Fayed estate.”
On the sources of Al Fayed’s wealth, Harrods said: “Fayed is widely reported to have held a variety of significant business interests before, during, and after his ownership of Harrods.”
Richard Meeran, a partner at Leigh Day law firm who is responsible for some victims’ claims against Harrods, told openDemocracy: “Leigh Day continues to support its clients in maintaining that there does need to be a thorough investigation into wrongdoing and systematic deficiencies to safeguard survivors of sexual abuse, not only on the part of Fayed and Harrods, but others, including the Metropolitan Police, Crown Prosecution Services, and medical professionals.”
“It still haunts me to this day, but I feel that to move on, I need to talk about it,” Sundarason said. “It is so important that there is a way for younger versions of me to be able to come forward, to be able to tell someone what has happened, to be believed, to be able to speak the truth.”
*Names have been changed to protect identity. Sexual assault survivors have a lifelong right to anonymity.
