26.09.2024

Another predator escapes justice

Class society puts people at the mercy of sadists like Mohamed al-Fayed, says Paul Demarty. However, a counter-culture of radical egalitarianism can combat the established culture of abuse

So the BBC has, at long last, exposed the late billionaire, Mohamed al-Fayed, as an especially prolific and - even for the genre - creepy sexual predator.

We have learned what, naturally, ‘everyone knew’: that, while owner of Harrods, he used the luxury department store essentially as a harem. He would monitor CCTV footage to pick out women who were his type - the usual fantasy of unimaginative men: young blondes. He would pick out those in the worst position (financially or otherwise) to resist. His staff would cajole them into submitting to intrusive medical examinations for unknown purposes, but presumably to detect sexually transmitted infections (one victim believes her virginity was also being assessed). Then he would start to make his moves.

Some, apparently, would submit, presumably on a transactional basis, and would be showered with gifts. Many would not, but men of his class are not accustomed to taking no for an answer. The BBC mentioned five accusations of rape and many more accusations of lesser sexual assaults. He used every mechanism available, from hush money to legal threats to threats against the victim’s family - to ensure silence. He employed various toughs, mostly ex-policemen, to make his points plainly.

There are distinct echoes, of course, of the BBC’s former golden boy, Jimmy Savile. Both men were thought of as maybe a bit dodgy, but mostly no worse than eccentric. Both were establishment figures who did not exactly fit the usual template - Savile on account of his Yorkshire twang and garish clobber, Fayed thanks to his Egyptian ancestry, celebrity vulgarity (remember the statue of Michael Jackson he had placed at the front of Craven Cottage?) and strange accessory role in many great events of the 1990s, from the ‘cash for questions’ scandal to the death of Diana Spencer.

Opportunities

Fayed’s modus operandi was rather different, however. Savile was a rapist of opportunity, and was prolific because a British establishment apparently bereft of common sense gave him so many opportunities: he would assault a child at some charity event, or a patient at Broadmoor, or a corpse in the mortuary of Leeds General Infirmary. Fayed, as we have seen, had a more methodical approach - of selecting, grooming, molesting and terrorising young women from a small, but constantly refreshed, pool of candidates.

In that respect he is somewhat more typical. The trouble with the Savile case is that he was so depraved, grotesque and bizarre - it is as if he walked off the pages of the 120 days of Sodom. The institutional failings thereby revealed were real enough, but appeared to pose the problem of how we prevent our institutions from being infiltrated by insatiable psychopaths. In absolute terms, with due respect to Savile’s many victims, this is a much smaller problem than that posed by cases like Fayed’s (or, a few years ago, Harvey Weinstein’s).

There is a much-quoted characterisation of the goals of political conservatism, made by an obscure American composer by the name of Frank Wilhoit: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects, but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds, but does not protect.” It is arguable whether this truly applies to conservatism as an ideology, but the phenomenon itself is easily attested as a social reality. What is defended by conservatism, after all, is social inequality - its natural character, and the disastrous consequences of trying to get rid of it. The predations of billionaires are the most obvious of the disastrous consequences of maintaining it.

The law, after all, certainly protected this most litigious of men. Only the most prestigious outlets with the largest armies of lawyers could take on Fayed; the threats he made to his victims - that they were powerless, that he would crush them - were surely correct. Very occasionally, a major media organisation would take the bait. ITV produced a documentary raising allegations of sexual harassment against him in 1997. Two years earlier, Vanity Fair published a scathing profile by Maureen Orth, which included allegations of sexual harassment, though it was mainly focused on the dubious character of Fayed’s finances.¹ He sued, naturally.

What happened next is told in a recent article in The Guardian by Vanity Fair’s then editor, Henry Porter. Porter and a lawyer named David Hooper began to dig into Fayed’s affairs, and discovered ample justification for Orth’s claims, and worse: “Hooper and I are not professional investigators, so it’s significant that by the summer of 1997 we had gathered enough evidence in those three areas, particularly on the sex abuse, to be confident of a good outcome at trial.”²

But the evidence never came out at trial, because the magazine’s owner began to mend fences with Fayed in a Turkish bath in the summer of 1997. Porter wanted to press ahead, to get some of the more troubling evidence discovered out in open court - but then the death of Diana happened. It was decided that destroying the reputation of a grieving man would not seem wholly proper! Porter kept much of the evidence, and gave it over to the BBC.

Because the law protects the rich, things are therefore open to being settled by extra-legal means: back-scratching, Turkish baths, representations to the right sorts of people. There are few legal regimes in the world more favourable to the well-off than English libel law, which, in the end, descends from laws protecting the dignity of the state from troublemakers and perceived traitors.

The question is not so much how can he have got away with it, but rather: how stupid would you have to be to get caught? According to Orth’s profile (and the more recent disclosures), Fayed managed his affairs in a way that left him utterly dependent on armies of flunkies, whom he nevertheless treated like dirt (quite literally: he was a severe germophobe). His 38-strong security detail codenamed him “the fat bastard”. He bugged his employees’ phones, had them followed, ranted at them. And yet they all more or less kept mum, because he kept opening his wallet - either to pay them off or pay his learned friends to write threatening letters.

Phoney pharaoh

Fayed got away with it despite being hardly the best integrated of the billionaire class - neither blue-blood nor blue-chip. He was a member of that strange subspecies of the very wealthy, or at least the extremely profligate, whose wealth was very often largely in doubt (the most famous surviving example, of course, is Donald J Trump).

Fayed always seemed to be flashing around more money than he could possibly have had. Indeed, he bought Harrods in the mid-1980s with hundreds of millions of pounds that he claimed was his own money, backed by assurances that he owned substantial assets in shipping, real estate, oil and much else. He was no pauper, but most of these assets were fictional. The money, in all probability, belonged to the Sultan of Brunei, who was leaking scads of cash to all kinds of chancers at the time. That was the time of Thatcher, of the deregulation of finance, where fictional wealth could be rolled over into real money with a little prestidigitation and luck when it came to one’s enemies.

The power granted to the rich in our post-Thatcher, post-Reagan world is extraordinary. It serves to isolate them from the consequences of their actions almost entirely. Jeff Bezos recently went through the most expensive divorce in history, and still has more money than he could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes. He gets to go to space, in a rocket that looks more than usually like an enormous todger. We have not ever heard any allegations of sexual impropriety against him, but, should they arise and be substantiated, it would hardly come as a shock. Well, naturally: billionaires do that sort of thing, don’t they? Because they have a handful of passports to hide behind, and the ability to make such problems go away. They are protected, but not bound, by the law and morality of the age, free to get out there and grab life by the pussy.

What are our means of protection against this? On the evidence of the Harrods business, certainly not the world’s HR departments. Admittedly, Fayed’s exploits came early in the period of mandatory sexual harassment awareness training and bureaucratic procedures, but all this stuff is, in the end, about avoiding liability, not preventing misdeeds.

There are political aspects to this, and cultural ones. Politically - besides the struggle for an egalitarian socialism per se - we battle against the various sectionalisms of the working class, which prevent, in one place, native and migrant workers fighting together or, in another, male and female. It is as a collective that the workforce even of a place as strange as Harrods can protect each other - from sexual predations and from the various reprisals that can follow.

Taboo

All of that entails, so far as is possible, a culture of equality in our organisations, be they trade unions or parties. We must revive the taboo that once existed against ‘making good’: ‘Rise with your class, not out of it’ was the slogan (attributed to Scottish communist John Maclean). Yet that was not a mere 19th and 20th century thing, and extant hunter-gatherer societies enforce an egalitarian culture by humiliating those among them who get too cocky.

Conservatives of the Thatcherite stamp like to ridicule this kind of moral practice, perhaps as ‘tall poppy syndrome’, which we used to hear so much about. I do not see anything ridiculous in it at all - certainly not compared to an ideology which must, in the end, be content with rich men turning the world around them into giant harems.