Attorneys for 37 women said they would sue Harrods, the luxury department store, over the rape and sexual assault they say its former owner committed.
Lawyers representing dozens of women who have detailed harrowing allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, said on Friday that they would launch a civil case against the luxury British department store for allegedly enabling his abuse.
At a news conference on Friday, a day after a bombshell BBC documentary and podcast laid out a pattern of sexual violence and rape of female employees during the time that Mr. al-Fayed owned the store, lawyers for at least 37 women said Harrods had “acquiesced to” an unsafe environment that had failed the alleged victims. About 20 of those women looked on from the audience.
Mr. al-Fayed, who died last year at 94, was a billionaire tycoon who owned the iconic store from 1985 to 2010.
“We will say it plainly, Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong, one of the lawyers, adding, “But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods.”
Mr. al-Fayed was “enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship,” Mr. Armstrong said.
Harrods, which is now owned by the state of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, issued a statement shortly after the documentary was released on Thursday, saying it was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”
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