When I heard about the death of the 94-year-old billionaire businessman and former Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed last year, my response wasn’t exactly charitable. Good riddance, I thought, to my one-time employer who had presided over a workplace rife with misogyny and abuse. I was 18 and had just finished my A-levels when I worked at the store in the 1990s. Having grown up in the sticks in Devon, I was desperate to move to London and knew the store employed school leavers on seasonal contracts in the run-up to Christmas. Five days after arriving in the capital, I got a job as a waitress and catering assistant working across Harrods’ many restaurants, plus a room in a house in Putney. I was delighted. My plan had come together.
What I didn’t know was that Harrods was a nightmare for scores of its female employees. In a new BBC investigation, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods, more than 20 women allege they were sexually assaulted by their former boss, with five saying he raped them and that the company covered it up. On Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, one of those women, Gemma, gave a devastating account of her time working as one of Fayed’s personal assistants for two years in the late 2000s. The sexual harassment happened from day one, she said, with Fayed making lewd comments and grabbing her breasts and crotch in front of co-workers. Later, while on a business trip to Paris, she says, he raped her. (Fayed sold Harrods in 2010. The current owners have said they are “appalled” by the allegations and apologised to the victims).
Hearing Gemma’s account left me saddened but not surprised. Fayed’s predatory behaviour was an open secret at Harrods; the word among female employees was that we should do everything in our power to avoid being noticed by him. This was hard since he regularly went on walkabouts around the shop floor accompanied by a male entourage, marking out female staff with whom he wanted a private audience. It was common knowledge that Fayed favoured women on the perfume and makeup counters and would allegedly offer promotions and cash to those who caught his eye. I never met him directly; the closest I got was in the food hall, where I was briefly stationed on the cheese counter. As he passed by with his retinue, I like to think the strong waft of camembert offered me a wall of protection.
Yet nothing could insulate me from the broader culture of menace and misogyny at Harrods. It was a place where male workers felt at liberty to harass female colleagues, seeing them as fair game. The atmosphere felt more 1960s than 1990s: we were routinely leered at, verbally taunted and subjected to groping. My female co-workers and I quickly learned to enter the kitchen areas sideways, doing a crab walk with our backs to the wall to avoid being ambushed by men trying to cop a feel while we had our hands full. This behaviour was widespread and normalised, meaning there was no one we could complain to. And so we gritted our teeth, kept our eyes open and got on with it.
Of course, what I experienced pales next to the brave women who have come forward to speak about their experiences with Fayed. But it is important to understand the culture that allows men to do monstrous things and to keep on getting away with it. There are reasons why women don’t challenge or call out misogynistic behaviour in the workplace: they know they will be branded uppity or troublesome, or face being demoted or fired, all for the faux pas of wanting to do their job free of harassment. At a press conference yesterday, a lawyer representing the women said one of them had been threatened with “serious consequences” if they spoke out.
So why bring it up now, when Fayed is dead and cannot be brought to justice? The answer, as ever in these cases, is power. The women speaking out about Fayed didn’t stand a chance against a living billionaire with a phalanx of lawyers at his disposal, even though some tried. In 2009, the CPS decided not to charge Fayed over a claim that he had assaulted a 15-year-old girl at the store. They stood no better chance than the hundreds of victims of Jimmy Savile did in facing down their abuser, another rich man and fabled philanthropist who correctly banked on the fact that he was protected by his celebrity status – and that few would believe he was anything but a saint.
Still, as the #MeToo movement showed, there is power in telling these stories after the event, and exposing the abusers and the institutions that protected them. Not only does it help victims come to terms with the horror of what happened to them, but it can embolden others in similar situations to speak out and, where possible, stop such behaviours in their tracks. Telling past stories of abuse can galvanise businesses and institutions to put systems in place for cases of misconduct to be reported and taken seriously. Most of all, it sends out a message to sexual predators and their enablers that actions have consequences, that women now have a voice and no longer want to live in a world where powerful men can prey on them with impunity.
Fiona Sturges is an arts writer for the Guardian and other newspapers
