It was May 1991 and Mohamed Al Fayed was in a foul mood: “I told you, no sex with anybody else, no relationship with anybody else.”
The target of the then 62-year-old billionaire’s ire was Jen, 20, who had worked in his personal office at Harrods since the age of 16.
“I said: ‘What do you mean?’ He proceeded to list a whole bunch of times, places, dates, where I’d been seen with my boyfriend from the food hall, and these weren’t necessarily during the week. They were at weekends. They weren’t necessarily in London. They were in Surrey.
“The dates were very, very specific, the locations and everything was 100% accurate. Mohamed said to me: ‘You do know that John Macnamara [Fayed’s head of security] worked for the Met police. He was very senior in the Met police.’”
Over her four and a half years at Harrods, having joined the luxury store in Knightsbridge as a management trainee in 1986, Jen claims to have been repeatedly groped and sexually assaulted – and at one point strangled – by Fayed.
It started with him “teasing” her with a dildo he kept on his desk and built up to an alleged attempted rape in Fayed’s Park Lane apartment, she said.
She had not spoken a word of it to her family until a week ago. Fayed was a monster, she said, but it was not the Egyptian businessman’s death last year at 94 that persuaded her it was safe to talk to lawyers preparing a claim against Harrods.
The clincher, she said, was learning that John Macnamara was dead. “It’s just knowing that that person’s not around, that that person can’t hurt you any more,” she said. “He knew what Mohamed was doing to us, and was mopping up some of that stuff to make sure it didn’t get any further.”
Macnamara, a former deputy head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad with special responsibility for the public sector corruption unit, was Fayed’s right-hand man; always at his shoulder, a keeper of secrets and loyal to his boss right up until his own death aged 83 in 2019.
He had been taken on by Fayed in 1987 as director of security for House of Fraser (Stores) Ltd after retiring at 51 from the Met with the rank of detective chief superintendent.
He was promoted in 1994 to oversee all of Fayed’s security needs, deploying his knowledge of covert surveillance and a myriad of other dark arts to target his boss’s enemies, as chronicled in court documents and his own admissions to parliamentary hearings related to claims that Fayed had made cash payments to the MP Neil Hamilton in return for placing parliamentary questions.
It was Macnamara whom Fayed put in charge of trying to prove the veracity of conspiracy theories about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and his son Dodi Fayed. Macnamara admitted at the official coroner’s inquiry to lying about how much alcohol had been drunk by the chauffeur Henri Paul on the night of their deaths in August 1997.
When Hermina da Silva, a Portuguese nanny to Mohamed Al Fayed’s children, said she would not keep silent over being sacked for rebuffing her employer’s aggressive advances, it was Macnamara who assured his underlings she would soon be arrested.
And she was, for stealing property from Fayed’s brother’s apartment on Park Lane. She was later released without charge and went on to be awarded £12,000 compensation.
It was Macnamara who was tasked with closing down a prospective article about Fayed in Vanity Fair in 1995, and then pursuing the journalists and sources behind it. And multiple women say it was Macnamara who sought to break their will to speak out.
The author and journalist Tom Bower knew Macnamara well. Fayed was a key source for Bower’s book on the Harrods owner’s former business partner and rival, Tiny Rowland. Macnamara, a keen digger of dirt, was the conduit.
“The reason he appointed Macnamara [at Harrods] is because Tiny Roland had appointed Macnamara’s predecessor at the fraud squad,” Bower told the Guardian. “He copied Rowland – and the reason they chose the fraud team was because they’re both fraudsters, and they needed their expertise.”
Macnamara, despite having retired from the Met years earlier, appeared to have retained close relationships with officers. “I once went with him to Chelsea police station, and he was sort of handing out all these hampers and bottles of champagne. It was amazing,” Bower said.
Fayed had spotted Jen within weeks of her joining the store, while she was on secondment to the fifth floor “management suite”. “Over those four and a half years, I was subjected to initially sexual harassment and mental abuse, and then sexual assaults and then attempted rape,” she said.
She has no doubt that Macnamara knew everything. “He was very cold and quite direct,” she said. “There had been times when he’d seen me in tears or coming out of Mohamed’s office in a state.”
Fayed provided Jen with a flat on Park Lane. All the employees believed their phones were being tapped, and the regular replacement of the film in the cameras in the offices by Macnamara’s people let them know that nothing was going unnoticed in the building.
Jen discovered Fayed was also watching her in the apartment when he called her after she had just got out of the bath. “I had a problem with my back, so I was laid on my bed with my legs up against the wall, and I was naked. The phone was by my bed, and I picked up the phone, and he just said: ‘Why are you lying like that?’ It just turned me cold.”
She quietly started to look for a new job but one day when coming into work she was told to go to the office of one of Fayed’s aides, where she also found Macnamara waiting for her. “They said: ‘We understand that you’ve been disloyal and we know that you’re looking for another job. Nobody chooses to leave Mohamed’s employment; he chooses when you leave.
“‘So what we’re going to do now is you’re going to write a letter of resignation, and we’re going to tell you what to write, and you’re going to write it, and you’re going today, and that’s it.’ So they stood over me, the two of them, and John told me what to write.”
She was escorted off the shop floor by security guards and thrown on to the pavement “like a criminal”, she said.
Jen said her next experience of Fayed came after she had reluctantly agreed to speak anonymously to the journalist Maureen Orth, who was writing an exposé in Vanity Fair.
“I was working in a hotel, and I had a phone call from John Macnamara completely out of the blue. He said: ‘I know that you’re talking to Maureen Orth. So this is just a phone call to remind you what you were told when you left Harrods, that you are not to speak about Mohamed Al Fayed.
“‘And if you do decide to do that, then I would like to remind you that I know where your parents live and I know where you live. And wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to either them or you.’ And he hung up.”
Last week a BBC documentary revealed allegations that five women were raped by Fayed, with several others alleging sexual misconduct.
On Thursday, the Met called on survivors who had not yet come forward to do so. A spokesperson said: “We must ensure we fully explore whether any other individuals could be pursued for any criminal offences.”
Lawyers are continuing to build a case against Harrods for its alleged failure to protect Fayed’s employees. The managing director of Harrods, Michael Ward, who was appointed by Fayed in 2006, has publicly apologised, saying the billionaire had presided over a “toxic culture of secrecy, intimidation, fear of repercussion and sexual misconduct”.
Jen said there were others who were yet to face justice – and also other women who had yet to start to process their trauma. “This time last week, my family didn’t know anything,” she said.
“It’s just the last week that’s given me a huge amount of courage to talk to my parents, my brother, my husband. I feel now it’s about doing what we can to make sure that if there are other people out there that are still struggling, that we can get them to come forward and have some help.”
