37 women accuse late Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed of sexual assault

The late billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, the longtime owner of London's luxury department store Harrods whose son died in a car crash with Princess Diana, is being described by accusers as a "monster" and a "predator" following allegations that he raped several women who worked for him at the store in London.

"We have survivors from all over the world," said lawyer Bruce Drummond at a news conference Friday in London, announcing that 37 women, including six Americans, had come forward to claim assaults including rape. Among the group are five women who allege they were raped by the Egyptian billionaire, who died in August 2023 at the age of 94.

The allegations involve "cover ups, threats and a quarter century of sexual abuse" that lawyers said were experienced by the women, "some as young as 15 and 16."

"Many women dreamed of working there [Harrods] to be associated with this prestigious corporation," said prominent American women's rights advocate and attorney Gloria Allred, who is also representing the women behind the accusations. She said they instead discovered that beneath the "glitz and glamour was a toxic, unsafe, and abusive environment."

U.K. news outlets report police investigated allegations of harassment and assault from several women against Al Fayed during his lifetime, but he was never charged. Al Fayed denied those accusations.

"He knew where my family lived. I felt scared and sick."

The lawyers said most of the victims were left feeling powerless, overwhelmed with fear of facing retaliation.

"Their terror was reinforced by threats, surveillance, and phone tapping," claimed Allred at the news conference in London, adding that one of Al Fayed's alleged victims, identified as Natacha, said he'd targeted the most vulnerable members of his staff — "those of us who needed to pay the rent and some of us who didn't have parents to protect them."

Natacha was at the news conference in person and, along with some of the other women, has at least partially waived her right to anonymity. Her full name was not given. She said she'd been accompanied on one occasion by one of Al Fayed's security guards to his private sitting room, where the door was subsequently locked behind her.

"There was sex toys on view," she said. "Mohammad Al Fayed, the person I worked for, pushed himself onto me."

It was alleged that Al Fayed's abusive behavior was not a secret and was widely known among employees at Harrods.

The department store — which Al Fayed sold in 2010 — was accused on Friday of having enabled its former boss in a "vast web of abuse," as there was a "procurement system in place to source the women and girls."

That allegedly included "doctors administering invasive gynecological exams as a condition of employment for some of the employees who were targeted by Mohamed Al-Fayed for sexual abuse by him."

Harrods' current owners, the Qatari state-owned state of Qatar Investment Authority, told CBS News' partner network BBC News that it was "utterly appalled" by the allegations against Al Fayed. The BBC said the company acknowledged that the women had been failed by the business, for which it sincerely apologized.

"This is and was a systematic failure of corporate responsibility," said lawyer Dean Armstrong, who is also representing the women.

Armstrong said the "case combines some of the most horrific elements of the cases involving Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein." Al Fayed "was a monster enabled by the system," he said.

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