Mohamed al-Fayed, Former Harrods Owner, Accused of Raping 5 Women

Multiple former employees told the BBC they had been raped or sexually assaulted by the billionaire businessman, who died last year.

Multiple women have accused Mohamed al-Fayed, the billionaire former owner of Harrods, the luxury British department store, of rape and sexual assault, according to an investigation by the BBC.

Five women said Mr. Fayed, who died in 2023 at age 94, had raped them, while others detailed alarming accounts of sexual assault and harassment while they were working at Harrods.

Mr. Fayed, a tycoon with numerous properties and ships around the world, owned Harrods from 1985 to 2010. Later in his life, he became best known for the romance between his son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales, who both died in a 1997 car crash in Paris.

In a BBC documentary released on Thursday called “Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods,” more than 20 female ex-employees presented harrowing accounts of abuse. The allegations span years and continents, with accusations in London, Paris, St. Tropez and Abu Dhabi.

While the BBC investigation is not the first to accuse Mr. Fayed of unwanted sexual advances or harassment, it offers the clearest picture yet of abusive patterns of behavior and raises questions about how women’s accounts were dismissed for so long.

In a 1995 investigation in Vanity Fair by Maureen Orth, an employee said that Mr. Fayed “regularly walked the store on the lookout for young, attractive women to work in his office” and detailed other problematic behavior. Mr. Fayed sued for libel but eventually dropped the case.

In 2017 and 2018, Channel 4, a British broadcaster, spoke to several people who said Mr. Fayed had sexually harassed and groomed female employees. Some of the women interviewed spoke again in the BBC documentary.

Many of the women interviewed by the BBC were granted anonymity, used pseudonyms, or used only their first names when describing the abuse. One, who worked as a personal assistant to Mr. Fayed in the 1990s, described being raped by him at his apartment in London when she was 19.

Others described how Mr. Fayed would scour the department-store floor and pick women to work in his office. They were given intrusive gynecological health checks and tested for sexually transmitted diseases, the results of which were sent directly to him.

Former staff from the department store also said that Mr. Fayed’s behavior toward women was apparent.

“It was well known — everybody knew about it,” Tony Leeming, who worked as a department manager in Harrods from 1994 to 2004, told the BBC.

Harrods issued an apology on Thursday, saying that the organization was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”

Mr. Fayed sold Harrods to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2010 for 1.5 billion pounds, about $2 billion at today’s exchange rate.

“These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms,” the company said. “We also acknowledge that during this time his victims were failed and for this we sincerely apologize. We are doing everything we can to fix this.”

The company said it was now “a very different organization” from the one Mr. Fayed had owned and controlled, and added that since 2023, when new information had come to light about allegations of sexual abuse, “it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved.” That process is still available for any current or former Harrods employees, the company added.

Harrods also posted instructions for former employees who believe they were victims of sexual misconduct by Mr. Fayed, to complete a form to report the allegations to the company. It said that complaints would be considered individually and that if victims wanted to claim compensation, it had an established process.

Mr. Fayed, an Egyptian-born entrepreneur, moved to Britain in 1974, and bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris, alongside his brothers, in 1979. He controlled oil, shipping, banking and real estate around the world, and Forbes had estimated his net worth last year at $2 billion. As his wealth grew, he courted celebrities and grew close to the royal family for a time.

But it was the death of his son that came to be most associated with him.

In the years that followed, Mr. Fayed became a vocal critic of the royal family, whom he blamed for his son’s death and that of Diana. Mr. Fayed was depicted, often framed in a positive light, in the final season of “The Crown,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series that offered a fictionalized version of the lives of Queen Elizabeth and her family.

Reflecting on the series, one of the women who reported being sexually assaulted by Mr. Fayed told the BBC: “I don’t want him to be seen as some kind of hero.”