I’m afraid I shrieked when I read that Michael Cole – longterm publicist for the late former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed – cannot come to the phone these days. If you covered a certain phase of British public life, you would know that Michael Cole could always come to the phone. Coming to the phone was what Michael Cole did, always to emit some hugely pompous shitblast in defence of his master, who is now the subject of multiple rape and sexual assault allegations. Alas, Michael is currently so shocked that no emission has been forthcoming. Instead, his wife was deployed to inform the press that Michael “is not giving any interviews or talking at the moment”. However, she did claim he found the women’s allegations “terribly distressing” and that “of course” he had been unaware of all of it.
From spokesman to sending out your spokeswife … I would say life comes at you fast, but of course it doesn’t. Fayed ran his entire race without his years of alleged sexual crimes catching up with him, and though he is not entombed in a pyramid on the roof of Harrods, as he wished, he certainly got away with it all. When he died, Cole rushed out to inform Radio 4’s Today programme that his former boss was “fascinating … larger than life … full of great humanity”. Yeah – not the third one.
According to the spokeswife, Cole is now in seclusion dealing with the incredible shock of the mounting allegations that Fayed was a prolific sex offender. Since the BBC documentary based on the testimony of 20 women aired, another 100 approaches have been made to the legal team who were already representing 37 women, and it is safe to assume there are many still too traumatised to make that call. I shall leave it to readers to decide whether Michael, a former journalist, has somehow forgotten about all the allegations of sexual impropriety made during Fayed’s lifetime that he personally batted away – or whether he is simply the worst publicist ever for having zero clue about any of his client’s alleged … what is the word? … “vulnerabilities”. Given that Tom Bower’s unauthorised biography, which detailed several allegations of sexual assault, came out while Cole was specifically charged with handling Fayed’s publicity, his lack of curiosity/memory seems sensationally remarkable.
But then, it isn’t remarkable – and it is unfair to single out Michael. The Times yesterday published a useful rundown of Fayed’s people, from the mouthpieces, lawyers and security henchmen to the doctors who performed “purity examinations” on young female PAs. When you see the vast scale of it all, “entourage” sounds too wan a word for this motley crew of enablers, enforcers and concealers, and for all the other motley crews that surrounded “larger than life” men, from Michael Jackson to Harvey Weinstein to Jimmy Savile. I prefer to think of such set-ups as the sex-case industrial complex.
Fayed’s isn’t even the only one in the current news cycle. Much has and will be written about the charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution laid against the music mogul Diddy, real name Sean Combs. But for space constraints I want to focus on a 2016 surveillance video which surfaced back in May, in which a towel-clad Combs is shown throwing his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura to the floor in a hotel corridor, then repeatedly kicking her before dragging her motionless body back towards the room she has just escaped.
I wasn’t surprised that Cassie had long been telling the truth, despite Diddy’s serial denials. What took my breath away was what the location implied – the sheer number of people who must have been involved in justice not being served. What exactly is the process for covering up a filmed incident of serious assault by an international star in the corridor of a hotel owned by a major international chain? Let’s just say I imagine Diddy’s lot are quite familiar with it. But think of the hotel side. There are CCTV images – it is a whole department’s job to monitor CCTV. Were the management informed? Where were the police? Quite the mystery.
In Combs’s camp, you can only guess at how many of the sex-case industrial complex were called upon to do their special designated job to make it go away. Lawyers, NDA experts, crisis PRs – who knows the precise combination of moving parts, but they were presumably all working in perfect symphony to ensure that this ghastly footage never went anywhere until CNN published it in May, a staggering eight years after it occurred. Diddy’s powers were beginning to desert him – but even weeks before, a raid as he was about to board his private jet had resulted in the arrest of only one individual for possession of drugs. Not Diddy, you understand, but a former college basketball star player who was part of his entourage. “How did a college hooper become Diddy’s alleged drug mule?” ran a New York magazine headline.
The sex-case industrial complex is a place where everyone has their job, a whole interconnected corrupt society that regularly comes into contact with actual society – a boring place of rules and boundaries – but only in order to take what it wants and spin off back into the lawless ether again. Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods was also like this, according to multiple allegations. As far back as 1998, Henry Porter wrote in this newspaper of some investigative run-ins with Fayed’s people, stating that he had been “left with the eerie sense that we had been dealing with a foreign power: a fiefdom, which despite its real location in Knightsbridge, operated quite independently from the rest of Britain, with a security service of its own, an armed police force and a tyrant in command”. He was right, as all those shut down by the Diddy machine in recent years were too. We still live in a world of powerful men’s Neverlands.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
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