Book review: Cameras, microphones, and money used to isolate Al-Fayed’s victims

Alison Kervin's book examines how Al-Fayed first groomed, then humiliated his victims — who are said to number in the hundreds — over a period of several decades.

• The Monster of Harrods: Al-Fayed and the secret, shameful history of a British institution 
• Author: Alison Kervin 
• Publisher: HarperCollins Price: €22.99 

ON May 29, 1997, Mohamed Al-Fayed bought Fulham Football Club.

“I want to help Fulham get back into the Premiership,” the flamboyant Egyptian tycoon told a group of journalists assembled at Craven Cottage, the oldest football stadium in London.

Within five years — and with £30m investment from Al-Fayed — Fulham were back competing at the highest level of English football.

Under Al-Fayed’s chairmanship, Fulham created the first full-time professional women’s team in Europe.

“It’s a gain for feminism,” the side’s captain, Ronnie Gibbons, told The Guardian in April 2000.

Four months earlier, Gibbons won her first cap for Ireland.

That year, the 20-year-old Fulham captain was sexually assaulted by Al-Fayed at Harrods — which the Fulham chairman then owned.

Gibbons was asked to attend a meeting at the prestigious London department store, where she agreed to speak to Al-Fayed’s children about football. But Al-Fayed showed up alone.

Gibbons was then brought into a room and forcibly kissed, groped, and made to sit on Al-Fayed’s knee.

“When she finally got away, she didn’t speak out about the abuse because she didn’t want to [risk] the future of the women’s team,” writes Alison Kervin in The Monster of Harrods.

The book features an interview with the former Ireland international and Fulham captain.

She told Kervin that Al-Fayed sexually assaulted her again one year later.

Gibbons retired from football, aged 25, in 2005.

“I feel very sad that I had to do that, but I had no choice,” Gibbons told Kervin, a former sports editor of The Mail on Sunday, whose previous books include Clive Woodward: The Biography (2005) and Phil Vickery: Raging Bull (2010).

Kervin’s latest book publishes a year after Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods (2024) first aired on the BBC, which gave testimonies of more than 20 women who claimed they were sexually assaulted by the former Harrods chairman.

“When the documentary first came out, I hadn’t started writing the book,” Kervin explains from her London office.

“But I was already aware of some of the abuse.”

In July 2013, Al-Fayed sold Fulham FC to Pakistani American billionaire Shahid Khan for around £200m. Seven years later, Al-Fayed sold Harrods to the Qatar royal family, for an estimated £1.5bn.

When Al-Fayed died in August 2023, aged 94, he left behind a net worth of roughly £1.7bn.

In the wake of his death, Kervin’s two friends told her that Al-Fayed had sexually abused them in two separate incidents.

“Their stories were very similar,” Kervin explains.

“I initially thought of writing a feature article. But after I saw the BBC documentary, I was inspired to write this book.”

Kervin gleans some details from the revelatory BBC documentary, but the book’s narrative is mostly constructed from primary research.

Namely: 60 interviews with survivors, witnesses, and former Harrods employees.

The British journalist, author, and media consultant examines how Al-Fayed first groomed, then humiliated his victims — who are said to number in the hundreds — over a period of several decades.

Typically, they were young women Al-Fayed encountered in Harrods. Some were customers. Others were staff members.

Most were approached to work in Al-Fayed’s personal office. Once trust was built, each woman was persuaded to be tested, in house, for sexually transmitted diseases. The results were then passed directly to the Harrods chairman.

When his doctors had deemed a woman clean and ready. Al-Fayed either raped or sexually abused the woman in question.

“Many women believed they were alone in this abuse, which meant they suffered alone,” says Kervin. So how did Al-Fayed get away with the abuse for so long?

Kervin says:

He isolated everybody. He had cameras and microphones all over the offices where these women worked that recorded everything.

“That meant the staff at Harrods were scared to talk to one another and were constantly terrified that they would be sacked.”

Money also helped. It silenced victims, and the press. An article citing Al-Fayed’s name with sexual misconduct appeared in Vanity Fair in 1995.

Two years later, four women alleged that they were repeatedly groped by Al-Fayed and subjected to crude remarks and promised rewards in return for sex. These comments were aired on a programme entitled Sex, Lies and Audiotape, broadcasted by ITV.

But Al-Fayed’s lawyers managed to quash similar stories.

They often deployed Slapps (strategic lawsuits against public participation), designed not to win cases but to intimidate and financially drain critics into silence.

“[Al-]Fayed knew if he wanted to, he had enough money to bring any national newspaper down,” says Kervin.

“He created an environment where it was very difficult to write anything about him because of the fear of prosecution. This made it very hard for journalists. He did the same in Harrods: Creating a culture of silence where nobody dared challenge him.”

Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, central London, where Al-Fayed had cameras and microphones all over the offices that recorded everything.

A cohort of yes men and women inside Harrods also played their part. Most victims interviewed in Kervin’s book mention three prominent loyal Harrods servants: Kelly Walker Duncalf, Dr Wendy Snell, and John Macnamara.

They were allegedly paid handsomely by Al-Fayed to facilitate and enable his sexual perversion, violence, and psychological torture. 

Macnamara, who died in 2019, became head of security in Harrods after previously serving as deputy head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad. 

Walker Duncalf began working on the shop floor at Harrods in 1997, aged 19. Within six years, she was working at the top tier of store approvals. Kervin’s book contains numerous interviews with victims who explain Walker Duncalf’s role.

They say she conducted “store walks” to “hunt for potential victims and instructed senior staff to take Polaroid pictures of the most attractive women” in Harrods — which were later than assessed and passed up to Al-Fayed, who made sexual selections.

Walker Duncalf also handed out business cards to young women in London bars and pubs. All were encouraged to come into Harrods and meet the chairman. “It’s hard not to make comparisons between Kelly Walker Duncalf and Ghislaine Maxwell,” says Kervin.

In late June 2022, Maxwell was sentenced by a New York courthouse to 20 years in prison for conspiring over a decade with disgraced deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse underage girls.

Today, Kelly Walker Duncalf lives in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. Kervin approached Walker Duncalf numerous times to give her side of the story, but she chose not to.

This past August, London’s Metropolitan Police announced that 146 people had reported crimes to their ongoing inquiry relating to Al-Fayed’s decades-long sexual abuse of women who worked at Harrods.

'Al-Fayed knew if he wanted to, he had enough money to bring any national newspaper down.'

Kervin points to a glaring irony in this dark tale: The close relationship between certain serving and past Metropolitan Police officers and key members of Al-Fayed’s security team.

“It would be better if there was an independent organisation doing the investigation,” she says.

“You can only hope that there is a sensible outcome from the police investigation.”

Compensation, if it happens, will at least be an admission of guilt, Kervin stresses.

“But it also feels soulless bringing the abuse down to a monetary number. Many victims I spoke to claim their lives were ruined from the day they were attacked. How do you compensate that?”

Kervin believes the Al-Fayed estate should pay compensation from their own pocket, rather than the money coming from Harrods — now under new owners. “That would really help the victims,” the British author concludes.

“But the [Al-Fayed] family are resisting the idea that they should have to make a contribution to compensate the victims.”