Five Mohamed Al Fayed abuse survivors confirmed as human-trafficking victims

The Home Office has formally recognized at least five survivors of Mohamed Al Fayed as victims of human trafficking, a designation that validates what the survivors themselves have been arguing for months: that the deceased Harrods owner could not have orchestrated decades of abuse without systematic help from people around him.

The confirmation arrived in June, in official letters marked "conclusive grounds." For Justine, one of the survivors, reading those words in writing—that she had been a victim of modern slavery and trafficking—was both a relief and a shock. "It's a really significant thing," she told the Press Association, describing the moment as leaving her "shellshocked." The five confirmed cases span from the 1990s through to after 2010, when Harrods was sold. Some women were recruited under false pretenses to positions within the store itself. Others were hired for legitimate roles, then singled out from the shop floor for abuse. The trafficking was both international and domestic in nature.

The scale of what investigators are now examining extends far beyond a single department store. Isabella, who worked in the chairman's office at Harrods in 2001, laid out the geography of Fayed's reach in an interview with PA: his yachts, his aviation business, the Ritz Paris, properties scattered across France and Monaco, holdings in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. "He couldn't have done what he did without Harrods processing women to him and silencing them afterwards," she said. The institutional machinery, she suggested, was not incidental to the abuse—it was foundational to it.

The allegations against Fayed span from 1977 to 2014 and number more than 400. They include rape, sexual assault, human trafficking, false imprisonment, drugging, and forced abortions. Fayed died in 2023 at age 94 without ever being charged. One woman came forward to describe being trafficked to Paris in 2008 on his orders, then sent to London where he sexually assaulted her. Pelham Spong, 40, from South Carolina, recounted how Fayed forcibly kissed her and offered her a salary of €65,000 a year in exchange for sex.

The Metropolitan Police investigation into these crimes, known as Operation Cornpoppy, opened 21 months ago. To date, four people have been questioned about who may have facilitated Fayed's offenses. That pace has not satisfied survivors, who have lodged complaints about how the police have handled the investigation. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is now examining the force's handling of allegations between 2018 and 2024. Harrods, in a statement, said it supports survivors in their pursuit of justice and continues to cooperate with the Met. But the confirmation of trafficking victims suggests the investigation is only beginning to map the full architecture of what enabled one man's abuse to persist across continents and decades.