6 days ago
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By JP O'Malley
October 1, 2025 — 12.00pm
BIOGRAPHY
The Monster of Harrods: Al-Fayed and the secret, shameful history of a British institution
Alison Kervin
HarperCollins, $35
In late August 2023, Mohamed Al-Fayed died peacefully at his home in Surrey, England, aged 94. The flamboyant Egyptian tycoon became a global celebrity as owner of Paris’ Ritz Hotel,Fulham Football Club and the prestigious London department store Harrods. Shortly after his death, former BBC royal correspondent Michael Cole compared him to a saintly philanthropist. “Many people who worked for Al-Fayed were beneficiaries of his kindness and generosity,” said Cole, who was Al-Fayed’s PR spokesperson between 1988 and 1998.
“[Cole shielded] the world from the truth of [Al-]Fayed’s life,” writes British journalist-author Alison Kervin in The Monster of Harrods. The book comes a year after Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods (2024) first aired on the BBC, which gave testimonies of more than 20 women who claimed they were sexually assaulted by the former Harrods chairman. Kervin gleans some detail from the revelatory documentary. Mostly, though, her first-rate research steers her gripping narrative.
She examines how Al-Fayed first groomed, then humiliated his victims, who are said to number in the hundreds. Typically, they were young women he encountered in Harrods; some were customers, others were staff. Most were approached to work in Al-Fayed’s office. Once trust was built, each woman was persuaded to be tested, in house, for sexually transmitted diseases. The results were then passed directly to the Harrods chairman. “When his doctors had deemed [a woman] clean and ready, he’d either rape or sexually abuse her,” Kervin explains.
A distressing but compelling read, her book contains 60 interviews with survivors, witnesses and former employees. Melissa Price was introduced to Al-Fayed in 1986. The 16-year-old student was offered a job as a private antiques buyer. She was later sexually assaulted at Al-Fayed’s Saint-Tropez residence. Eventually, Price told her father, Charles H. Price II, then the US ambassador to Britain. He advised his daughter to keep schtum. He did, however, privately share details of her traumatic attack with several prominent politicians, including US President Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Liz began working at Harrods in 1994. She was left bruised and bleeding after Al-Fayed raped her at his apartment. Within hours, a Harrods security officer accused the teenager of stealing a bottle of perfume and threatened to call the police. She was given £250 in cash and made to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Canberra native Anne-Marie Kruk was also brought to Al-Fayed’s Park Lane apartment, where she was sexually assaulted.
Australian Anne-Marie Kruk with Mohamed Al-Fayed when she was at Harrods.Credit: 60 Minutes
How did Al-Fayed get away with it? Money helped. An article citing Al-Fayed’s name with sexual misconduct appeared in Vanity Fair in 1995, and others followed. But Al-Fayed’s deep pockets silenced the press for decades. A cohort of yes-men and women inside Harrods also played their part. Most victims interviewed mention three prominent loyal Harrods servants, who were allegedly paid handsomely by Al-Fayed to facilitate his sexual perversion, violence and psychological torture. One of them, John Macnamara, who died in 2019, became head of security in Harrods after previously serving as deputy head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad.
Kervin is keen to stress why the indelible link “between certain serving and past Metropolitan Police officers and key members of Fayed’s security team” matters. “This relationship is central [to understand] how Fayed got away with his criminal activity for so long,” the author explains.
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And yet, London’s Metropolitan Police are now running the formal inquiry looking into Al-Fayed’s decades-long abuse. In August, the Met announced that 146 people had reported crimes to their inquiry. Many will undoubtedly receive large compensation packages. Today, Al-Fayed’s reputation is in tatters.
But from beyond the grave, it seems, the serial sex offender still holds some power to potentially silence his former victims.
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