Minutes before Jen is about to appear, composed and resolute, on live TV to an audience of millions, she is vomiting in the studio’s toilets. She and four other women are due to speak for half an hour about how they were sexually assaulted by Mohamed Al Fayed. “I couldn’t eat that morning, and I was sick about 15 minutes before we went on air,” Jen says of the interview with BBC Breakfast at the end of September.
“I wasn’t very well practiced at that point at telling my story and finding words. So I had a very physical reaction.” About a week earlier, a BBC documentary, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods, had aired.
It uncovered decades of abuse perpetrated by the billionaire and former Harrods owner, who died last year at the age of 94. Jen had worked as his personal assistant for five years from 1986 to 1991. Her story was told anonymously under the pseudonym “Alice” in the documentary, and her voice was also distorted to protect her identity.
This interview with BBC Breakfast was the first time she’d agreed to waive her anonymity - meaning it was the first time she’d spoken publicly, as herself, about what she had been through almost four decades ago. “One of the things [my counsellor] said to me before I fully decided to tell my story face-to-camera was that when you do that, you lose control of your story - because all of a sudden it’s not yours anymore,” she says. “It’s out in the world, you can’t really control who knows it, what they think.
