I noticed his predilection for young women. I didn’t notice the climate of fear they were working in
The first was to prove quite useful in my journalistic career. It is a principle I later called Al Fayed’s law: an individual’s bank balance is inversely proportional to their tolerance for criticism.
The line that enraged him – resulting in a flurry of irate emails, threats of legal action and eventually an unhappy parting of ways with a PR man – was about skirts. I thought readers would be interested in something I found curious and a bit creepy: Al Fayed’s personal office was staffed by a handful of young, strikingly attractive women who happened, on the day I was there, to be wearing short skirts. I was in my early 20s; a few seemed younger than me.
I felt sorry for him – a man who, despite his vast wealth, struck me as paranoid, foul-mouthed, desperate to ingratiate himself with the establishment, strangely terrified of germs. Mostly, though, he seemed cleaved by grief. It wasn’t my job to write an article he would like, but I didn’t expect the reaction I got.
We now understand the predators’ playbook much better than we did then; how men like Al-Fayed or Jimmy Savile in Britain or George Gibney or Eamon Casey here get away with it by hiding in plain sight. Al Fayed’s power and money fuelled his predation but, as with Savile, his general strangeness and studied eccentricity were useful alibis.
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