Kate – not her real name – was 16 and had recently started working at Harrods when Mohamed Al Fayed summoned her to his apartment.
Inside the Park Lane residence, “he tried to pressure me into having sex with him,” Kate says. “He tried to be charming… but I kept saying no.” Kate says the late Harrods owner’s mood changed and the threats started. “He became angry, the doors were locked and I couldn’t get out. He raped me.”
Kate did not feel ready to tell her story before the broadcast of the documentary Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods. Now she says she wants people to understand what a monster Fayed was, and her testimony throws more light on the corrupt system at the heart of the company, which has since been sold to new owners.
Like many of the women who say they were assaulted while working for the luxury department store, she recalls the doctors who carried out intimate medical examinations on staff. Others describe the personal assistants who summoned them to Fayed and the security guards who protected the apartment where he carried out many of the attacks.
“There was a whole system to facilitate this,” says Dean Armstrong KC, one of the barristers representing some of the alleged victims. How did the system operate?
