Princess Diana’s friend Mohamed Al-Fayed, who was also the father of her last boyfriend, Dodi, has been posthumously accused of rape by five former employees at his luxury London department store, Harrods.
The Egyptian businessman, who died last year aged 94, is also accused of sexual assault by many more women, according to a new BBC documentary.
Dodi Al-Fayed started dating Diana in July 1997 after they holidayed together, along with Princes William and Harry, on his father’s yacht in St. Tropez. They died together the following month in a car crash as they were being driven—pursued by paparazzi—from one of Mohamed’s properties in Paris, the Ritz hotel.
Al-Fayed devoted much of the rest of his life to trying to prove Diana and Dodi were murdered on the orders of the British Establishment, claiming they had become engaged and the royals could not countenance the mother of a future King William marrying a Muslim.
The BBC film, Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods, says the assaults occurred between 1984 and 2010 when he was the owner of the prestigious London store. According to previews of the film widely published in U.K. media Thursday, more than 20 female former staffers at Harrods have made accusations of sexual abuse against the mogul.
Assaults and rapes are alleged to have happened in both London and Paris, including at Villa Windsor, the Paris home—later bought by Al-Fayed—that was occupied by the former King Edward VIII and his wife Wallis Simpson after his abdication.
A Vanity Fair article about Al-Fayed in September 1995 alleged the businessman subjected staff to enforced HIV tests, although this was characterized as a product of his germophobia.
The new film cites one woman as saying she was obliged to have invasive gynaecological checks before joining the company. She says she was “sold” the procedure as a general health check but says medics were actually looking for sexually transmitted infections, saying: “It was definitely looking for [STIs], because I’ve still got the doctor’s reports, and they did list like, you know, clear for chlamydia or all of those kinds of things. The relevance to doing an admin job versus having your ovaries checked doesn’t make sense. But at the time, I was told that was what was required, and if I wanted the job, I had to do it.”
The closest the Vanity Fair article got to hinting at sexual impropriety with staff was a former employee who said he hired multiple secretaries, of which there were “some who type and some who don’t.”
In the same article, Al-Fayed’s then-spokesman, Michael Cole, described Diana arriving at a party hosted by Gulfstream saying, “She ignored everyone else and went straight up to Mohamed and said, ‘I didn’t know you were rich enough to have one of these planes!’ Diana is so easygoing with Mohamed… Mohamed is not one of those who’s overwhelmed by her. They spark off each other very well.”
The store’s current owners told the BBC: “The Harrods of today is a very different organisation to the one owned and controlled by Al-Fayed between 1985 and 2010. Since new information came to light in 2023 about historic allegations of sexual abuse by Al Fayed, it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible.”
