“I am walking around feeling terrified of somebody who is dead,” explains Gemma, who has been reliving the moment when she says Mohamed Al Fayed raped her. “He just had that power – I am petrified of someone who is no longer alive”. She is among more than 20 women who told us the former Harrods owner sexually assaulted or raped them while they worked at the luxury London department store.
Many of them describe being imprisoned by a similar sense of fear; it is what kept them from coming forward for so many years. Some were worried our documentary team might have been secretly working for the businessman’s associates when we first contacted them after his death last August. Even after we provided assurances, they were concerned about how those close to him might react.
There were lots of conversations about what might happen if our meetings were discovered. We could sense their paranoia about the consequences of speaking out and the fear engendered in them by Fayed and the people who worked for him. In these circumstances, the bravery of these women is to be applauded even more.
Fayed was a man who used money and power throughout his life to bully and intimidate his way into getting what he wanted. In the early 1990s, a government investigation concluded he had lied when he bought Harrods. He deployed dirty tricks against Tiny Rowland, his rival in buying the business, and was even accused of stealing items from his safety deposit box at the store.
A few years late.