The systematic sexual abuse scandal involving Mohamed Al Fayed - the late Egyptian billionaire who moved to the UK and father of Dodi, who died alongside Princess Diana in a 1997 car crash - is spreading like wildfire into an international legal case in the wake of the battle started by the Metoo movement.
Following the BBC documentary on Mohamed Al Fayed, 150 women have come forward to report the harassment they suffered from the tycoon who once owned the luxury department store Harrods in London (until 2010) and the Ritz hotel in Paris, where the alleged victims - originally from various countries, including Italy, Malaysia, Australia, Romania, the USA and Canada - worked "amid episodes of rape and sexual harassment" perpetrated "over a period of 25 years".
These were the words of the legal team involved in the civil damages case focused on the current owners - the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar - of the exclusive shopping centre in the British capital that employed many of the former employees involved.
"Al Fayed was a monster and he could operate thanks to the system," said lawyer Dean Armstrong , underlining how prominent and influential the billionaire, who died in 2023 at the age of 94, was in the Kingdom, especially between the 1980s and 1990s , during a press conference in which it emerged that among the magnate's accusers, the youngest was 16 years old at the time of the contested events.
Not only that, the legal team, which includes as a leading figure Gloria Allred, previously involved in battles in US courts in defense of women victims of celebrities, has stated that the Al Fayed scandal "combines some of the most abject elements" of the cases of other infamous serial sexual predators such as Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. The story was made public by the BBC in a shocking documentary entitled "Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods" : over 20 women had come forward with their stories of harassment and violence among the billionaire's many properties (starting with luxury apartments) and the VIP environments he frequented, in London, Paris, Saint Tropez and Abu Dhabi.
