Australian women are among the hundreds of alleged victims who have accused late Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed of sexual abuse and rape.
More than 400 alleged victims have contacted the legal team working on a case against Al-Fayed, lawyer Dean Armstrong revealed on Thursday.
A BBC documentary in September revealed Al-Fayed, who died last year aged 94, sexually abused female staff at his London department store Harrods, forced them to have medical screenings and threatened consequences if they tried to complain.
‘The sheer scale of abuse perpetrated by Al-Fayed, and facilitated by those around him, sadly, continues to grow,’ Armstrong told a news conference in London.
Another lawyer for the accuser, Bruce Drummond, told the ABC that six of the alleged victims were Australian.
Five of the women worked at Harrods, while the sixth worked for a supplier. All of them were in their twenties at the time of the alleged attacks.
Al-Fayed always denied similar accusations raised by other reports before his death.
When asked for a response, Harrods pointed Reuters to its past statements on the allegations, in which it has apologised, said it was ‘appalled’ by them, and that it had launched a process for any current or former Harrods employees who wished to claim compensation.
Australian women are among the hundreds of alleged victims who have accused late Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed of sexual abuse and rape (Fayed is pictured with actress Lucy Liu in 2005 at the opening of the Harrods January sale)
More than 400 alleged victims have contacted the legal team working on a case against Al-Fayed, including six Australians (pictured: the sex predator on his yacht in 2018)
Mr Drummond said the more than 400 claims have been made by women from around the world, mostly from Britain but also from the United States, Australia, Malaysia, Spain, South Africa and other countries.
‘That, in our opinion, is an industrial scale abuse,’ Mr Drummond said, adding the alleged offences took place ‘within the walls of Harrods’ but also in other locations linked to Al-Fayed’s business empire, such as Fulham Football Club, the Ritz Paris and his estate in Surrey.
Victims include the daughter of a former US ambassador to Britain and the daughter of a well-known soccer player, Mr Drummond said, without giving any names.
The BBC documentary said Harrods had failed to intervene and helped to cover up abuse allegations during his ownership.
Al-Fayed relentlessly courted and cosied up to senior members of the UK Royal family
Lawyers have criticised the Harrods-run compensation scheme, saying some of the victims do not feel comfortable to reach out to Harrods directly for compensation as that is where the abuse unfolded.
Mr Drummond said some senior staff members from the Al-Fayed era still worked at Harrods.
The Financial Times last week reported that four alleged victims had quit the Harrods compensation scheme due to concerns over potential conflicts of interest and poor communication.
Several media organisations had reported allegations of sexual abuse against Al-Fayed before the BBC documentary, including Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.
Indeed, many of his offences were first detailed in an unauthorised 1998 biography by journalist Tom Bower.
The notorious germophobe Fayed was accused of ordering young female staff members whom he found attractive to undergo ‘invasive’ STD tests.
Mr Bower wrote that a doctor called Jane Reffell allegedly performed an ‘exhaustive gynaecological examination’ on a young lawyer who was hand-picked to work for Fayed in in 1989 because of her good looks.
The seedy billionaire would later make repeated sexual advances towards the lawyer then aged 25, forcing her to lock herself in the bathroom of his Paris suite.
Fayed, who was known to stalk the halls of Harrods looking for attractive young women to work in his office on the top floor, relentlessly courted and cosied up to senior members of the UK Royal family (pictured with the then Princess of Wales and his wife, Princess Diana who later died in a car crash with Fayed’s son Dodi in Paris)
Daily Mail Australia previously tracked down Dr Reffell to the sleepy village of Bangalow in NSW’s Northern Rivers region, about 15 minutes inland from hippy hangout Byron Bay, where she has run a women’s health practice since 2002.
Mr Bowers’ book alleged Dr Reffell ‘understood what Fayed required’, which was for his female staff to have a clean bill of sexual health before he preyed on them.
However, Dr Reffell vehemently denied ever playing such a role.
‘I just don’t believe it was me,’ she told this publication.
‘There are other doctors that worked very closely with Fayed but I didn’t.’
When pressed on whether she had ever performed a sexual health test on a Harrods employee, Dr Reffell said: ‘I did do tests but it was on a private, confidential basis.
‘And I never did them for Al Fayed per se but I might have done them for his staff if they were patients of the practice.’
Mr Bowers’ book alleges that the results of the sexual health test were sent to Alison Bozek, Fayed’s secretary.
However, Dr Reffell said that the sharing of a patient’s confidential information was a ‘red line’ she would never cross.
‘We just wouldn’t do it,’ she said.
‘You’d have to have patient consent for that.’
Dr Reffell said she was ‘horrified’ by the revelations and expressed sympathy for Fayed’s victims.
Fayed, who was known to stalk the halls of Harrods looking for attractive young women to work in his office on the top floor, relentlessly courted and cosied up to senior members of the Royal Family.
His movie producer son, Dodi, was dating Princess Diana when the couple died in a 1997 car crash in Paris.
Fayed’s insatiable appetite for harassing young women in his employment was both enabled and subsequently covered up by an army of highly-paid security guards, lawyers, publicists and doctors.
It is understood that Scotland Yard is actively pursuing those who may have helped Fayed carry out his crimes.
