Like other victims hand-picked to work in Fayed’s office, Natacha was sent for a medical when she joined Harrods, during which she was subjected to a gynaecological examination and tested for Aids and sexually transmitted diseases without her consent. She was never given the results, but we know from other victims that the results would routinely be sent straight to Fayed. She was, she says, being “checked for my purity”.
Private meetings with Fayed were initially above board, but then came the forced kisses and the groping that would happen without warning. “It was so quick,” she says. “It wasn’t like he’s gonna sidle up really slowly – he would grab you.” She says that “the fear left me paralysed”.
Despite working in the same office, Natacha and Catherine were not allowed to chat to each other at work, they were forbidden from taking lunch at the same time and never once left work together. If they wanted to communicate at work they had to secretly pass notes to each other, making sure they were not spotted by Fayed’s PA.
They did, though, pluck up the courage to meet up at weekends, becoming firm friends, though they never told any of their colleagues they were socialising together for fear that it would be reported back to Fayed. Anyone who talked, of course, might discover they were not the only victim, and Fayed was no doubt anxious to avoid that happening.
“We had to keep our meetings very secret,” says Natacha, “because you didn’t know who to trust. To us it was obvious others had succumbed [to the Fayed regime] because they had store cards, they had cars, Cartier jewellery, expensive clothes.”
‘He was very scary’
It is easy for anyone hearing the victims’ stories to wonder what stopped them from simply quitting their jobs.
Part of the answer, they say, is that they needed “to pay the rent”. Neither came from well-off families, and Catherine had lost her father when she was a child – as Fayed knew because he had probed her about it in her job interview and “probably saw a vulnerability, not having a father figure”. Natacha says that despite everything “I still wanted that job to be the job I thought I was going for”. On top of that, of course, was the fear.
“He turned,” says Catherine, her voice trembling and tears starting to form in her eyes, “and he was very scary. The tone in which he threatened you left you in no uncertain terms that he meant it, and he would send his security, and they did know where we lived, and if we ever said anything, not only would we never work in London again but they would come and find us.”
One victim has even described how John MacNamara, Fayed’s head of security, told her that she was a girl all alone in London and “someone could jump out of the bushes at you or you could have a sudden accident”.
None of the women regarded such talk as idle threats, hence the reluctance of Catherine and Natacha to take part in the BBC documentary when they were approached.
Both of them were so afraid of Fayed when they left Harrods that they left the country for lengthy periods because they no longer felt safe in London or even the UK.
In Natacha’s case, the end came when she was invited to Fayed’s Park Lane apartment for what she was told was a job review, and when she got there the door was locked behind her and Fayed’s bedroom door was open with sex toys on view.
She sat on the sofa and Fayed “pushed himself onto me”. They fell to the floor with him on top of her and she managed to kick herself free before running for the door. He laughed at her and told her that if she ever breathed a word to anyone, she would never work in London again, adding that he knew where her family lived. She never went back to the office.
In Catherine’s case she was sacked after she pushed Fayed away, hard, when “he tried to go up my blouse”. Both women were gone within eight to 10 months of starting.
Yet the ordeal did not end there. Natacha describes losing confidence and going abroad to find work, where she struggled with male bosses and for a time struggled with male relationships, though happily she says she is “all good now”.
‘I believed I was gonna get hunted down’
Catherine left the country to go travelling because: “I really, truly believed I was gonna get hunted down.” She suffered “a lot of nightmares”, she says.
For other women, the damage done by Fayed went even deeper. One woman was subjected to threats over the phone even after she left Harrods, became suicidal and had to spend six months in a psychiatric hospital. She was unable to form romantic relationships and missed out on the chance of having a family as a result of the trauma that Fayed had left her with.
Catherine and Natacha, who have waived their right to anonymity, agreed to this interview, and the BBC documentary, on the basis that their surnames would not be used. They do not want details of their current circumstances or even their employment history to be made public because they fear that someone might be able to use that information to find them. Someone with links to Fayed.
They insist that the road to justice goes straight through the doors of Harrods, rather than via any individuals who might have enabled Fayed’s internal human trafficking operation or helped keep it quiet.
Harrods was bought by the Qatar Investment Authority in 2010, but barrister Mr Anderson has a ready answer for anyone who suggests the post-Fayed Harrods should not be accountable for what went before.
“If you buy a house it’s your obligation to check the rafters aren’t rotten and the roof isn’t about to fall in,” he says. Fayed’s sexual abuse of employees was well documented as early as the 1990s, not least by Tom Bower in his 1998 biography, which detailed the medical examinations, the molestation and the threats.
Harrods says it has accepted “vicarious liability” for Fayed’s conduct, that it has reached settlements with the “vast majority” of people who have approached it since 2023 and that it is now “a very different organisation” from the one presided over by Fayed.
Mr Anderson is not satisfied. “They say they didn’t know about al-Fayed’s behaviour until 2023. That is simply not true.”
The victims’ legal team now includes Gloria Allred, the US attorney who has represented the victims of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby, among others. She says that Fayed’s abuse was “not a secret” when Harrods was sold and was “widely known by its employees”. The victims, she says, need “meaningful accountability for what they have suffered”.
The path to justice, then, may be coming into focus after women spent decades suffering in silence. The fear, though, may never go away.
Neither woman had told their families the full details of what happened to them before the BBC documentary was broadcast, and talking about it clearly drags up memories that they do not want to revisit.
“I’m sorry if I’m a bit intense,” Catherine unnecessarily says. “When you go back over it, you realise just how scary it was. You were in a complete terror-struck zone of absolute fear.”