'Cold and direct' Fayed's security chief accused of facilitating abuse

It was May 1991 and Mohamed AI Fayed was in a foul mood. "I told you, no sex with anybody else, no relationship with anybody else," he ranted.

- Daniel Boffey

The target of the then 62-yearold 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, after joining the luxury store in Knightsbridge as a management trainee in 1986, Jen claims to have been repeatedly groped, 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. But 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 now to talk to lawyers preparing a claim against Harrods.

The clincher, she said, was learning Macnamara was dead.

"It's knowing that that person's not around, that that person can't hurt you any more," she said. "He knew what Mohamed was doing, 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 the secrets and loyal to his boss right up to his own death in 2019 at the age of 83.