Shocking allegations

Al-Fayed allegedly assaulted 20 women

Al Fayed, the former Harrods owner whose son Dodi died with Princess Diana in 1997, died in 2023 at the age of 94. The BBC has now revealed serious allegations against the Egyptian.

(Bild: picturedesk.com/Kamil Zihnioglu / AP)

He ordered overtime and assaulted them. Numerous women have accused the former owner of the London luxury department store Harrods, Mohamed Al-Fayed, of rape, physical violence or sexual assault, according to a BBC report.

As the broadcaster reported on Thursday, BBC journalists spoke to more than 20 women for a documentary and podcast accusing Al-Fayed, who died last year at the age of 94, of sexual assault.

"Predator at Harrods"
The documentary "Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods", five former employees testified that they had been raped by the department store boss, five others reported attempted rape and 13 others said they had been sexually harassed by their boss. According to the report, Al-Fayed regularly called female employees to his London apartment in the evenings to work overtime - and then assaulted them.

There had already been allegations in the past that Al-Fayed had groped and sexually abused women. An investigation into alleged rape was dropped in 2015, according to the BBC. A former Harrods manager told the BBC that the boss's sexual assaults were common knowledge in the company and that there were frequent innuendos or jokes about them.

"Deeply shocked"
The current owners of luxury department store Harrods said they were "deeply shocked" by the allegations of abuse. "As a company, we have failed our employees who were his victims and for that we sincerely apologize."

In July last year, Harrods reached its first out-of-court settlements with women who claimed to have been sexually abused by Al-Fayed between the late 1980s and late 2000s.

Mohamed Al-Fayed was the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 together with the divorced wife of the then heir to the throne, Prince Charles, Diana. In 2010, Egyptian-born Al-Fayed sold the famous luxury department store to an investment fund of the Emirate of Qatar for the estimated equivalent of around two billion euros.