It was May 1991 and Mohamed Al Fayed was in a bad mood: “I told you, no sex with anyone else, no relationship with anyone else.”
The target of the then 62-year-old billionaire’s ire was 20-year-old Jen, who had been working in his personal office at Harrods since she was 16.
“I said: ‘What do you mean?’ She listed many times, places, dates when I was seen in the dining room with my boyfriend, and they didn’t necessarily have to be on weekdays. They were on weekends. They weren’t necessarily in London. They were in Surrey.
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“The dates were very, very specific, the locations and everything was 100% accurate. Muhammad said to me: ‘You know that John Macnamara [Fayed’s head of security] He worked for the Met police. “He was very senior in the Met police.”
During her four-and-a-half years at Harrods, Jen, who joined the luxury store in Knightsbridge as a management trainee in 1986, claims she was repeatedly groped and sexually assaulted by Fayed, and at one point strangled.
She said it all started when he “taunted” her with a dildo lying on her desk and escalated to an alleged attempted rape at Fayed’s flat in Park Lane.
He hadn’t said a word about this to his family until a week ago. He said Fayed was a monster, but it wasn’t the Egyptian businessman’s death at the age of 94 last year that convinced him it was safe to talk to lawyers preparing a case against Harrods.
He said the attendee learned that John Macnamara had died. “It’s just knowing that that person isn’t around, that that person can’t hurt you anymore,” he said. “He knew what Mohamed was doing to us and was deleting some items to make sure it didn’t go any further.”
Macnamara, a former deputy head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad who had special responsibility for the public sector corruption unit, was Fayed’s right-hand man; Always on his shoulder, keeper of secrets and loyal to her boss, until her death in 2019 at the age of 83.
After retiring from the Met at the age of 51 with the rank of detective superintendent, he was employed by Fayed in 1987 as security manager for House of Fraser (Stores) Ltd.
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In 1994, he was promoted to oversee all of Fayed’s security needs; He used his knowledge of covert surveillance and countless other dark arts to target his boss’s enemies, as revealed in court documents and his own admissions in parliamentary hearings about allegations made by Fayed. Parliament paid MP Neil Hamilton cash in return for asking questions.
It was Macnamara who Fayed tasked with trying to prove the veracity of conspiracy theories regarding the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her son Dodi Fayed. Macnamara admitted at the official coroner’s inquest that he lied about how much alcohol driver Henri Paul had drunk on the night they died in August 1997.
When Hermina da Silva, the Portuguese nanny of Mohamed Al Fayed’s children, said she would not remain silent about her dismissal for rebuffing her employer’s aggressive advances, it was Macnamara who assured his subordinates that she would be arrested soon.
And it was because he stole goods from Fayed’s brother’s flat in Park Lane. He was later released without charge and was entitled to compensation of £12,000.
It was Macnamara who was tasked with shutting down a potential article about Fayed in Vanity Fair in 1995 and then tracking down the journalists and sources behind it. And many women say it was Macnamara who tried to discourage their desire to talk.
Author and journalist Tom Bower knew Macnamara well. Fayed was a key source for Bower’s book about Tiny Rowland, the former business partner and rival of the owner of Harrods. Macnamara, a master at digging earth, was the canal.
“The reason he appointed Macnamara [at Harrods] It’s because Tiny Roland appointed Macnamara’s predecessor to the fraud team,” Bower told the Guardian. “He copied Rowland; “The reason they chose the fraud team was because they were both fraudsters and they needed their expertise.”
Macnamara appeared to have maintained close relations with officers despite retiring from the Met years ago. “I went to the Chelsea police station with him once and he was just kind of handing out all these baskets and bottles of champagne. It was incredible,” Bower said.
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Fayed first noticed Jen a few weeks after she joined the store, when she was on a temporary assignment in the fifth-floor “management suite.” “During these four and a half years, I was first subjected to sexual harassment and mental abuse, then sexual assaults, and then attempted rape,” she said.
He has no doubt that Macnamara knows everything. “He was very cold and quite blunt,” he said. “There were times when he would see me in tears or walking out of Mohamed’s office distraught.”
Fayed gave Jen a flat on Park Lane. All employees believed their phones were being tapped, and the regular changing of film on cameras in the offices by Macnamara’s men ensured they knew nothing was being overlooked in the building.
When Jen called Fayed after just getting out of the bathroom, she discovered that Fayed had also been watching her around the apartment. “I had a problem with my back, so I was laid on my bed with my legs against the wall and I was naked. The phone was next to my bed, I picked up the phone and he said to me: ‘Why are you lying like that?’ It left me cold.”
He began quietly looking for a new job, but one day when he arrived at work he was told to go to the office of one of Fayed’s aides, where he found Macnamara waiting for him. “They said: ‘We understand that you are unfaithful and we know that you are looking for another job. No one chooses to leave Muhammad’s work; He chooses when to leave.
“’So here’s what we’re going to do now; You will write a resignation letter, we will tell you what to write, you will write it and leave today. , that’s it.” So they both stood next to me and John told me what to write.”
He said he was escorted out of the store by security guards and thrown onto the pavement “like a criminal.”
Jen said her next experience with Fayed came after she reluctantly agreed to speak anonymously to journalist Maureen Orth, who wrote an exposé in Vanity Fair.
“I was working in a hotel and out of the blue I got a call from John Macnamara. He said: ‘I know you talked to Maureen Orth. So this is just a phone call as you leave Harrods to remind you that you were told not to talk about Mohamed Al Fayed.
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“’And if you decide to do this, then I want to remind you that I know where your parents live and I know where you live too. Besides, wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to them or you?’ And he hung up.”
Last week a BBC documentary revealed allegations that Fayed raped five women; Many other women also made allegations of sexual harassment.
On Thursday, the Met appealed to survivors who have not yet come forward. A spokesman said: “We must ensure we fully investigate whether other individuals may be pursued for any offences.”
Lawyers continue to file a lawsuit against Harrods, alleging Fayed failed to protect his employees. Harrods’ chief executive, Michael Ward, who was appointed by Fayed in 2006, publicly apologized, saying the billionaire had presided over “a toxic culture of secrecy, intimidation, fear of repercussion and sexual harassment”.
Jen said there are other women who have yet to face justice, and there are also other women who haven’t yet begun to process their trauma. “This time last week, my family didn’t know anything,” he said.
“This past week has given me great courage to talk to my parents, my brother and my husband. “I feel like now it’s about doing what we can to make sure that if there are other people out there who are still struggling, we can get them to come forward and get some help.”