The Met Police was told of allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed Al Fayed a decade earlier than it previously admitted.
The force previously said that its earliest report dated from 2005, when Al Fayed was still in charge of Harrods department store, but the BBC uncovered evidence of a reported sexual assault in 1995.
Samantha Ramsay, then aged 17, reported being groped to Scotland Yard by Al Fayed, which relatives say may have helped prevent other women from being abused if the force had acted sooner.
A Met spokesperson said it has no record of Samantha’s report on current computer systems, but in 1995 some reports were paper-based only and may not have been transferred over to digital systems.
Samantha later died in a car crash in 2007 aged 28.
Speaking to the BBC, her mother Wendy and sister Emma claimed the police told Samantha in 1995 when she reported being groped that many others had complained about Al Fayed.
Emma said that the police told Samantha: “We’ve added it to a pile of other female names that we’ve got that have made the same complaint against Mohamed Al Fayed.”
In testimony given to the News of the World in 1998, Samantha said Al Fayed offered her £50 notes and offered her more highly paid jobs during their first meeting.
Then at their second meeting, she said he urged her to wash herself with Dettol and then sexually assaulted her.
“I was terrified,” she told the paper at the time. “And then I rushed out of his office. I ran to the toilets and burst into tears.”
When she told her supervisor about the attack, he is alleged to have replied: “Another one.”
The following day, she reported the sexual assault to Marylebone police station in central London, and later to a police station near where the family lived in Hampshire.
While Hampshire Police came and took a statement, and sent the report onto the Met, relatives said there was no action taken.
“While we cannot change what has happened, we do acknowledge that trust and confidence is affected by our approach in the past and we are determined to do better,” Met Cdr Stephen Clayman said about the force’s response to Al Fayed.
More than 400 alleged victims or witnesses have come forward to lawyers concerning allegations of sexual misconduct against Al Fayed.
The Justice for Harrods Survivors group said this week its first letter of claim had been sent to Harrods - labelling it the "beginning of the formal legal process".
The group said the majority of the 421 inquiries they were dealing with were "in the Harrods context", but said others had contacted them from Fulham FC, the Ritz hotel in Paris and elsewhere.
The Metropolitan Police asked prosecutors to decide whether to charge the former Harrods and Fulham FC owner in relation to only two out of 21 women who made allegations, including of rape and sexual assault, between 2005 and 2023.
Evidence was shown to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2009 and 2015, but it decided not to go ahead with either because there was not "a realistic prospect of conviction".
Al Fayed acquired Harrods for £615 million in 1985.
In 2010, after 26 years in charge, he sold the department store to the Qatari royal family for a reported £1.5 billion. He died in 2023, aged 94.
Harrods said in a previous statement: “These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms. We also acknowledge that during this time as a business we failed our employees who were his victims and for this we sincerely apologise.
“The Harrods of today is a very different organisation to the one owned and controlled by Al Fayed between 1985 and 2010, it is one that seeks to put the welfare of our employees at the heart of everything we do.”
