He traded on the glamour of owning Harrods, the Paris Ritz and luxury yachts, but Mohamed al-Fayed was at the center of a dark web of alleged abuse, said French lawyers for women who liken him to US sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
French authorities began investigating the late Egyptian businessman and his brother Salah al-Fayed last year amid allegations of a vast system of sex trafficking and abuse on French soil.
“Every time I met Mohamed al-Fayed, he tried to assault me,” his former personal assistant Kristina Svensson told French police of her two years working at the Ritz.
Photo: AFP
Her testimony is all too familiar. The alleged crimes of Mohamed al-Fayed, who died in 2023 aged 94, first came to light in a BBC investigation in September 2024. In it, several young women who worked at his upmarket London department store Harrods accused him of rape and sexual assault.
British police told reporters that 154 people have so far come forward to say the former owner of Premier League club Fulham abused them.
Salah al-Fayed, who died in 2010, is also accused.
However, frustrated by London Metropolitan Police’s investigation of the alleged crimes, which span more than 35 years, some people have turned to France in the hope of finding justice.
“In England they’re ignoring the trafficking... They just want to make it about [Mohamed] al-Fayed and Harrods,” said Rachael Louw, a former Mohamed al-Fayed employee, speaking for the first time about her ordeal.
However, the French investigation is handled by “a unit specialized in human trafficking,” Louw said.
It is “a relief that our cases are actually being recognized as trafficking,” she said.
Louw was 23 when her bosses sent her to Salah al-Fayed’s yacht on the French Riviera.
Now, after 31 years, she has testified about what happened there to French investigators on Feb. 10.
Louw told reporters that she was first “spotted” by Mohamed al-Fayed in 1993 while working as a sales assistant at Harrods.
Shortly after, she was placed on a management training scheme, which required her to submit to a medical exam being employed by the chairman’s office in the summer of 1994.
The medical appointment went far beyond a standard checkup, with a pelvic exam and “thorough breast exam,” smear and HIV tests.
The results were not kept confidential.
The report was handed over to Harrods and described Louw’s personal life: Her parents’ separation when she was young, her father living in the US, and the death of her mother and grandmother. The doctor also noted that she took a birth control pill, had a boyfriend and was in “excellent” health.
The doctor “sent confidential information to arm the rapist,” said French lawyer Eva Joly, who is representing Louw and another former Mohamed al-Fayed assistant.
“These young women were like meat, and they wanted to know if they were fit to consume,” said Caroline Joly, another member of the legal team.
Several encounters were arranged between Louw and Salah al-Fayed at his home in London’s Park Lane, where Louw said she was drugged with “a crack cocaine mix.”
Louw was then offered a job as an assistant to Salah al-Fayed in France and she was sent there by private jet.
She said she refused further drugs, “and because he didn’t push anymore, I thought it was okay.”
“I had no reason not to trust this man ... this was my first job from university,” she said.
Staff confiscated her passport as she flew from London’s Luton airport to his yacht and once she arrived, “nothing” resembled the job she signed up for.
“I thought I was supposed to be filing paperwork, making arrangements, organizing office work,” she said.
Instead “there was no office, no normal working hours, no time off. I was expected to just be with him,” she said.
One night, Louw woke up to find Salah al-Fayed in her bed, claiming he was lonely, she said.
“I went ramrod straight and the rest of the night I was awake just lying there petrified,” she said, fearing any movement would be an invitation for him to touch her. “I didn’t know what he would do to me... I didn’t feel safe.”
What jolted her to escape was the prospect of being trapped alone with Salah al-Fayed after he bought a speedboat with only one bedroom, telling her “that he would take me to sail around the Italian coast.”
“I knew that if I went on that boat nothing good would happen,” she said.
Panicked, she booked the first Air France flight out and worked up the courage to ask for her passport back, which she received, although it was clear that Salah al-Fayed “was very angry.”
Home again, “I had blocked out” the details of what happened, she said. “I didn’t want to remember.”
For decades she feared she was bound by a confidentiality agreement she had signed at her interview, but seeing others speak out against Mohamed al-Fayed in 2024, she reconsidered.
“How can I be silent? There has to be a cost to what the perpetrators did. Because if they go unpunished, it emboldens the next man,” she said.
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