It was May 1991 and Mohamed Al Fayed was in a foul mood: “I told you, no sex with anybody else, no relationship with anybody else.” The target of the then 62-year-old billionaire’s ire was Jen, 20, who had worked in his personal office at Harrods since the age of 16. “I said: ‘What do you mean?’ He proceeded to list a whole bunch of times, places, dates, where I’d been seen with my boyfriend from the food hall, and these weren’t necessarily during the week.
They were at weekends. They weren’t necessarily in London. They were in Surrey.
“The dates were very, very specific, the locations and everything was 100% accurate. Mohamed said to me: ‘You do know that John Macnamara [Fayed’s head of security] worked for the Met police. He was very senior in the Met police.
’” Over her four and a half years at Harrods, having joined the luxury store in Knightsbridge as a management trainee in 1986, Jen claims to have been repeatedly groped and sexually assaulted – and at one point strangled – by Fayed. It started with him “teasing” her with a dildo he kept on his desk and built up to an alleged attempted rape in Fayed’s Park Lane apartment, she said. She had not spoken a word of it to her family until a week ago.
Fayed was a monster, she said, but it was not the Egyptian businessman’s death last year at 94 that persuaded her it was safe to talk to lawyers preparing a claim against Harrods. The clincher, she said, was learning that John Macnamara was .