Dozens of Women Emerge After BBC Film on Al-Fayed

In a BBC documentary that dropped Thursday, five women accused Mohamed al-Fayed, late owner of the luxury Harrods department store in London, of rape. On Friday, lawyers representing dozens more women stepped forward, saying that their clients also claimed rape and sexual assault at the hands of al-Fayed, and that they'd be filing civil suits. Per the New York Times, attorneys for at least 37 women slammed Harrods, alleging it had "acquiesced" to a threatening environment during al-Fayed's ownership of the store through 2010.

"We will say it plainly—Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster," lawyer Dean Armstrong said at the presser, echoing the words of one of the women in the documentary. "But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods." Armstrong added that al-Fayed, who died last summer at the age of 94, was "enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship." Armstrong noted that attorneys didn't plan to file a class-action suit, but rather to represent each client individually, as "every survivor suffered different harm here and different long-term effects."

Six of the accusers are said to be from the US, while others hail from Italy, Australia, Romania, and Malaysia. The four-member legal team, which includes American attorney Gloria Allred, also says that the suits could extend beyond Harrods, including to businesses al-Fayed owned in other countries, per the AP. The BBC reports that more than 100 women so far have reached out to the lawyers. One of the alleged victims, who went only by the name Natacha, said at the news conference that al-Fayed—father of Dodi Fayed, the boyfriend of Princess Diana who died with her in a 1997 car crash—was "highly manipulative" and "preyed on the most vulnerable," per the AP.

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Natacha claims al-Fayed sexually assaulted her one night in his apartment, then "laughed at me." "He told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was never to breathe a word of this to anyone, and that if I did, I would never work in London again," she said, adding she felt "scared and sick" after the incident. Harrods has put out a statement saying it's "utterly appalled" by the allegations. Allred, however, said Friday that Harrods' role amounted to an "abject failure of corporate responsibility," per the Guardian. (More Mohamed al-Fayed stories.)