It is disturbingly easy to respond with little more than fatigue to reports of powerful men sexually exploiting women, because there have been so many. The part of us that should emit shock, disgust and righteous outrage becomes dulled through overuse. And so, when Mohamed Al Fayed, the billionaire former owner of Harrods, died in 2023 and was then credibly accused of being one of Britain’s worst sex offenders, the collective reaction felt like a shrug.
The new Dispatches investigation, Delivered to a Predator: Al Fayed’s Fixer, however, ought to sharpen our revulsion and our resolve to fight for change. Building on the 2017 Dispatches documentary Behind Closed Doors and the 2024 BBC programme Predator at Harrods, it outlines the scale of the tycoon’s wrongdoing: last year, the Metropolitan police said it believed Al Fayed may have raped or abused at least 111 women and girls, but here a lawyer working for survivors estimates the number to be more like 300.
Dispatches has spoken to 16 victims and witnesses, mainly former Harrods staff, many of whom give their testimony in public for the first time. The rawness of the survivors’ interviews, blameless individuals trembling as they describe a trauma that has redefined their whole lives, is a reminder that one case would be one too many – but their stories match. They allege that Harrods’ working culture was one where young, usually blond employees were regularly manoeuvred into situations where they found themselves alone with the organisation’s chair, and either felt obliged to allow him to molest them, or were raped.
A picture emerges of a workplace where the boss’s interest in young women was an open secret. Everyone could see women who fitted the same aesthetic profile being fast-tracked to particular roles, or sent on errands that involved visiting Al Fayed’s offices on Park Lane, but nobody quite knew what was happening next and, if they did have suspicions, they felt powerless to speak out. It is a profoundly upsetting story of money buying impunity, but Dispatches makes a further claim about the logistics that is even more startling. It involves a name unknown the day before broadcast, but will be familiar to millions by the time you read this: Kelly Walker-Duncalf.
Walker-Duncalf, it is alleged, was the woman who made it possible for Al Fayed to prey on women. She joined Harrods in 1997 at the age of 19 and, a few years later, was running a department called “store approvals”, which meant she vetted new staff. Every contributor here describes her as an untouchable Al Fayed acolyte who had influence far exceeding her job description: Walker-Duncalf was “the second-most important person in Harrods”, according to one interviewee. “She had a degree of power that nobody else in the store had.”
The women who say they were abused by Al Fayed allege that they were brought to his attention by Walker-Duncalf: she either directly recruited them or identified them as employees who should be given an audience with the owner. One former Harrods worker says she had Polaroids of female employees pinned up on a board. But the contention that Walker-Duncalf abetted Al Fayed goes beyond the practicalities. The alleged victims say the presence of a woman, during the initial phase when being showered with gifts or given an inexplicable promotion, caused them to feel bewildered, or made them more likely to ignore the voice in their head that was telling them to run.
It is further alleged that Walker-Duncalf would scout for young women not just on the Harrods shop floor but outside the organisation, and even beyond Al Fayed’s ownership of Harrods; and that on occasion she would literally deliver his victims to him. One interviewee, Francesca, says she met Walker-Duncalf through a mutual friend in London in 2013, three years after Al Fayed sold Harrods. She says Walker-Duncalf told her that Al Fayed was looking for a new PA, then took her to meet him, an encounter that began with Francesca apparently being given the job – the deal sealed with an envelope full of cash – and ended with her being raped.
Reporting for Dispatches, Cathy Newman tracks Walker-Duncalf down to Jersey and reaches her by phone, apparently coming close to scoring an interview. Their meeting never happens, with Walker-Duncalf instead issuing a statement via her lawyer, denying that she enabled or facilitated any of Al Fayed’s crimes. It is not suggested that Walker-Duncalf was aware of his abuse. The inevitable new police investigation will have to provide a final answer to that; for now, this programme has made an invaluable contribution to the story of Mohamed Al Fayed, a horrifying tale that urgently needs to be told in full.