Reading back over the transcript of the disturbing interview I did with Mohamed Al Fayed’s PR man Max Clifford in 2008, I feel physically sick.
I was making a documentary revealing how powerful operators like Clifford were able to cover up damaging stories about their clients. But nothing could have prepared me for the extraordinary revelations he made about Al Fayed.
There was no way that a wily manipulator like Clifford would go on record to admit his malign influence on the media so we approached him for a normal sit-down interview at his palatial mansion in Surrey.
Afterwards, we made a show of putting away the cameras and Clifford, who had represented the Harrods boss for 15 years, started to really open up.
Mohamed Al Fayed is accused of raping multiple women during his time as Harrods owner from 1985 to 2010
Chris Atkins interviewing PR man Max Clifford in 2008. In secretly filmed footage, Clifford said Al Fayed groped employees and that he was ’76 going on 18 when it comes to young ladies’
What he didn’t know was that I had a secret camera filming inside my shirt button. Talking straight into it, he described how the ‘randy old sod’ who was ’76 going on 18 when it comes to young ladies’ was regularly groping his employees.
Revealing that some of Al Fayed’s victims were as young as 17, Clifford implied that they had gone ‘looking for it’.
‘There’s an awful lot of young ladies that are extremely happy to pamper rich, randy old [men]’, he continued, describing how two girls of this age ‘knew full well when he offered them a job as a buyer, that that was what was involved. To me – no problems’.
As the BBC documentary, Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods, screened last night makes clear, it was very far from the case that there were ‘no problems’.
Exploring claims that Al Fayed was a serial rapist, it featured interviews with 20 women who worked at Harrods during the 25 years that he owned the store.
Many described the exact incidents alluded to by Clifford, and my shock at hearing their brave testimony was compounded by the realisation that several attacks took place after I secretly recorded him back in 2008.
If Britain’s arcane libel laws had not prevented us publishing the full unedited tape at the time then maybe some of these women could have been spared further anguish.
We first knew we had a problem when I screened the footage of Clifford’s incredible admissions to our lawyers. Their faces went white, and they told us we would be insane to include these quotes in our film Starsuckers.
We didn’t have enough independent evidence to prove Al Fayed was guilty of these crimes, and in the inevitable libel case we would be crushed.
Many producers had actually made contact with some of Al Fayed’s victims, but they were understandably too scared to go on record.
The new BBC documentary includes harrowing evidence of Al Fayed’s fixers intimidating victims who were considering speaking out, including threats against their parents.
Clifford, who died in 2017 after being jailed for sex offences, tried to suppress Chris Atkins’s film with legal action. It was eventually released in 2009 with Al Fayed’s name bleeped out
Britain’s libel system is stacked against journalists trying to expose wrongdoing, and Al Fayed had a fierce reputation for trampling over anyone trying to hold him to account.
Reluctantly we had to bleep out his name in the final version of Starsuckers when it was released in cinemas in 2009.
Clifford went to extreme lengths to suppress the film, and deluged us with legal threats from a top law firm threatening to issue an injunction against the release.
We stood firm and the film gained huge exposure and was shown on Channel 4 several times – but always with the crucial quotes about Al Fayed’s sex crimes removed.
A couple of years later, another opportunity presented itself to expose Al Fayed’s terrible secrets. The Leveson Inquiry was established in 2011, purporting to be a fearless public investigation into the culture, practices, and ethics of the British Press.
Asked by the inquiry to give evidence, I wrote a detailed statement and included all the unpublished quotes from Clifford about how he covered up Al Fayed’s sexual abuse at Harrods.
They didn’t have to take my word for it – inquiry lawyers visited my offices to listen to the tapes to prove Al Fayed said every word. But I was horrified to see that when my witness statement was published, the inquiry’s team redacted every mention of Al Fayed.
This was supposed to be a judge-led public inquiry, with extremely broad powers and legal protections.
It had indisputable evidence of the most powerful PR man in the UK boasting about how he suppressed stories about a serial sex offender. But rather than expose these crimes, the inquiry acted in a way that protected the criminal – who was now free to potentially carry on offending.
Elizabeth Debicki as Diana and Salim Daw as Al Fayed in Netflix’s hit show The Crown. Chris Atkins says it portrayed Al Fayed as a lovable, genial eccentric who dazzles his son’s girlfriend
I spent the next few years trying and failing to get the story out. Another chance was missed in the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile scandal, when Clifford himself was arrested for historic allegations of sexual assault against women and girls as young as 15.
I was visited by officers from the Operation Yewtree investigation into the sex abuse allegations against Savile and others. They watched my undercover footage with amazement and took the clips as evidence to be used in the case against Clifford. In April 2014 he was jailed for eight years but died after a heart attack in 2017. Al Fayed’s name wasn’t mentioned in any of the reporting of the trial.
I sent my undercover footage to several national newspapers, explaining that it had been used as criminal evidence, but nobody dared to publish it.
Al Fayed was still alive, and every news outlet was terrified of him weaponising the legal system against them and ruining them in libel damages. And so the story seemed destined to remain in the shadows.
Ironically it was Netflix that inadvertently finally helped blow the scandal open. Last year I watched series 5 of The Crown in utter disbelief, as Peter Morgan’s script portrayed Al Fayed as a lovable, genial eccentric who dazzles his son Dodi’s girlfriend Princess Diana with his wit and charm.
In episode 3, Diana sidles up to Al Fayed at a racing event and they bond over being dismissed as social outsiders. Al Fayed insists that Diana calls him ‘Mou Mou’ and, giggling, she agrees and appears to fall under his spell.
This scene is complete fiction of course, like pretty much everything else in the Crown, but it’s presented as being based on truth. It means that an entire generation of Netflix viewers have been misled into believing that Al Fayed was a gentle rogue with a heart of gold.
Those behind the series claim ignorance. A quick online search would have shown that these allegations about Al Fayed have been swirling around for years. But it was decided to present Al Fayed in a positive light, and ignore the terrible crimes of which he’s been accused.
The Crown was given a rapturous reception by the rest of the media, and I didn’t see a single article questioning the completely false representation of Al Fayed.
Watching that revolting episode of The Crown again now feels like a true crime documentary, as they filmed at several key locations where it’s alleged Al Fayed carried out his attacks.
I wasn’t the only person who watched this sickeningly misleading drama in horror. Several of Al Fayed’s victims, appalled at how Netflix had sanitising his reputation, felt compelled to come forwards to the BBC investigation.
The BBC documentary shows several of them watching The Crown and castigating the show for covering up Al Fayed’s sex crimes. Netflix should remove these episodes immediately and apologise to the victims.
Al Fayed died in August last year aged 94 and never saw justice. His death likely helped allow these allegations to finally be heard. After all, the dead can’t sue. But he should have been stopped long ago.
Instead the media and legal establishment colluded to protect this grotesque figure and allowed him to carry out his despicable crimes for years.