Fayed accused of sexually harassing his Harrods staff
Cheska Hill-Wood
THREE women have accused former Harrods tycoon Mohamed Fayed of sexual harassment, a TV documentary said last night.
Cheska Hill-Wood claimed the billionaire coaxed her into wearing a swimsuit and tried to kiss her when she was 17.
Two others alleged they had been groomed by him to persuade them to have sex.
The trio made their claims to a Dispatches documentary broadcast on Channel 4 last night. Mr Fayed, 88, who owns the Paris Ritz Hotel and is a former owner of Fulham Football Club, has not responded to the allegations.
He is the latest high-profile man to be accused of sexual impropriety after the allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein spread to include other figures.
Mr Fayed is alleged to have used his power at the department store – which he sold for £1.5billion in 2010 – to target young employees.
He used the reputation of his film producer son Dodi, who died with Princess Diana in the 1997 Paris car crash, to pursue Miss Hill-Wood, she told the programme.
She was an aspiring actress who had recently completed a photoshoot as a debutante when she was approached ‘out of the blue’ to become Mr Fayed’s junior personal assistant in 1993. Now 41, she claimed he told her Dodi might be able to help her acting career as he was making a prequel to his hit film Hook.
Mr Fayed invited her to his flat to film a ‘portfolio’ to show Dodi and asked her to change into a swimming costume so his son could see her ‘shape’, she claimed.
She alleged he then ‘grabbed me and kissed me’ before she pushed him off. She claims he said: ‘I need you around me all the time. If you don’t sleep with me, I can’t help you with your acting career.’
Miss Hill-Wood, now an actress and gallery manager of the Fine Art Society in Mayfair, said she fled and did not return to work for Mr Fayed. She told Dispatches she did not take any further action because ‘it would have been the word of a 17-year-old nobody, I guess, against the word of a very powerful business tycoon’.
Two other women claimed Mr Fayed had repeatedly kissed them on the lips, given them cash and offered them flats, cars and promotion.
One, a 20-year- old student who worked at Harrods in the summer of 2005, said: ‘It’s unbelievable how you can be so disgusted by someone and yet be so afraid of someone, how someone can have so much power. [He was] a very frightening man.’
A Channel 4 spokesman said of the women: ‘Despite not knowing one another, their accounts, from two different decades, reveal a number of striking similarities.’
Mr Fayed’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Channel 4 said it had put the allegations to his lawClaim: yer but had not received a response.