More than 100 women have now come forward with allegations against the late Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian billionaire and former Harrods owner, accusing him of sexual abuse and assault spanning decades – as far back as the 1970s, as reported by The Telegraph.
Former employees describe a familiar pattern: young women plucked from the shop floor, promoted to back-office roles, then invited to Fayed’s luxury apartment, where some say they were assaulted or raped. According to multiple sources, Fayed would frequently patrol Harrods in search of potential victims – his behaviour reportedly an “open secret” within the department store.
The scale and duration of Fayed’s alleged abuse, legal representatives argue, could not have occurred in isolation. Scotland Yard has now confirmed an investigation into at least five potential enablers who are believed to have played key roles in facilitating or concealing the abuse – and at least one of them is a woman.
Lawyers for some of Fayed’s victims have called his operation “an extreme and extensive sex-trafficking network.”
In the case of Fayed, not all alleged enablers were directly perpetrating abuse. Some played subtler, though critical, roles in enabling it. Among them was the late Harrods corporate GP, Dr Wendy Snell, who is said to have signed off or conducted intimate medical examinations on women in their teens and early twenties.
One alleged enabler has been publicly named: Kelly Walker-Duncalf, a former Harrods executive, now 48, who runs a recruitment firm in Jersey. She has been accused by several women of helping Fayed identify and recruit young women. According to one account shared on Channel 4’s Dispatches, Walker-Duncalf allegedly told a woman – as she was being assaulted – to “close her eyes and think of someone else.”
The Telegraph has confirmed that Walker-Duncalf was arrested alongside Fayed in 2015 after a young woman reported that she had been groomed by her and later raped by Fayed in 2013. The Crown Prosecution Service ultimately decided not to pursue charges.
According to The Telegraph, at least four women in 2011 were approached in a pub in Surrey by a well-dressed blonde executive, promised opportunities at Harrods, and then transported to Fayed’s Park Lane penthouse in a white Range Rover. There is no suggestion this executive was Walker-Duncalf.
