The lawyer who helped victims sue the Metropolitan Police for failing to investigate John Worboys, the black cab rapist, is working with women allegedly attacked by Mohamed Al Fayed.
Phillippa Kaufmann KC has joined the legal team examining whether police had a duty to do more to bring Fayed to justice when allegations were made against him.
Since the BBC documentary Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods was shown last Thursday, more than 100 women have contacted law firms representing five women who say they were raped by Fayed while he owned Harrods, along with others who have made allegations of sexual misconduct.
There may also be a need for a public inquiry to understand whether some of the claims against Fayed were “swept under the carpet”, according to Emma Jones, a partner at the legal firm Leigh Day.
Fayed, who died last year aged 94, was accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault on several occasions as far back as 1995, so the legal team is examining whether or not police breached the Human Rights Act by failing to investigate him properly.
Vanity Fair magazine made allegations against Fayed in 1995, followed by ITV’s The Big Story in 1997 when four women claimed they were sexually harassed.
Then in 2009 the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute Fayed after claims he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl in Harrods. A further investigation in 2015 also did not lead to charges.
“The test is not just what officers knew, but what a reasonable officer ought to have known,” Jones said. “Given the amount of times this has come to the fore, and given the seriousness of the allegations … one has to ask oneself, well, what should they have known? And that leads to [the question]: did they know it, and did it get swept under the carpet?”
Jones said that it would be helpful for their investigations to hear from women even if they did not want to pursue a case.
Dean Armstrong KC, a barrister representing some of the women involved, said that “well over 100, maybe as many as 150” had come forward so far. He said that it was “an enormous shame” that public figures only spoke about Fayed’s behaviour after his death.
Jack Straw, the former home secretary, rejected Fayed’s application for British citizenship in 1999, saying he had a “general defect in his character” and last week said the Egyptian businessman had been “a bully”. The former manager of Fulham football club’s women’s team, Gaute Haugenes, said they had “protected” the players because “we were aware he liked young, blonde girls”.
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“Jack Straw came out this morning, I’ve seen a report, talking about why he wasn’t granted citizenship,” Armstrong said on Sky News yesterday. “We’ve had these matters coming out in the public domain from Fulham Football Club. It is an enormous shame for me, and particularly a much, much greater shame for all of those poor women who suffered at his hands, that these matters might have been said a bit earlier.
“Those people who didn’t speak up, particularly those in public office, I’m afraid, are deserving of criticism, because a lot of these women couldn’t speak up because they were threatened and they were in fear and they were isolated. But that wasn’t the case for a number of other more high-profile people who could have done.”
Armstrong added the Fayed case was “certainly within the province of a public inquiry”. “My opinion is it is hugely in the public interest when there is a system which is deployed in probably the most famous retail store in the country, if not the world, which appears to go unchecked for a number of years,” he said, referring to allegations that Fayed’s predatory behaviour included walking around Harrods with male colleagues to pick out female staff who he wanted to target.
“That retail store is then sold very close to when a prosecution has not been proceeded with and after the death, but more importantly, after the courage and the bravery of a number of women to speak out, a number of people in the public eye then decide to come out and effectively corroborate those matters,” he said.