The horrifying truth about my dad Mohamed Al Fayed that means I wish he’d been brought to justice

Omar Fayed is attempting to explain – not excuse – the monstrous behaviour of his late father, Mohamed Al Fayed.

In some ways it seems curious that Omar is even here, sitting in front of us, arms outstretched, palms open, talking openly about what must be an excruciating subject.

Being Al Fayed’s son cannot have been easy when he was alive. It surely isn’t now. Nobody would blame Omar were he to hibernate until the scandal subsides. With the charge sheet against his father growing exponentially, that doesn’t feel like any time soon.

Police now believe the billionaire Harrods tycoon, who died last year aged 94, may have raped and abused more than 111 women over nearly four decades, making him one of Britain’s most notorious sex offenders.

The point is Omar doesn’t have to be here, and yet the 37-year-old tech entrepreneur has come to The Mail on Sunday’s offices in London at his own behest because he feels ‘duty-bound to say something’.

He believes the public ‘deserve somebody close to the man in question to at least help shed light on his motives’.

To his credit, he is alone, without the crutch of a public-relations expert or lawyer.

Omar Fayed says he can now ‘join the dots’ about his billionaire Harrods tycoon father. Photo: PHILIP SINDEN / TATLER / CONDE NAST

Much of what Omar will impart over the next two hours is both shocking and fascinating. What his mother believes triggered her husband’s dangerous lust, for instance. And how he claims people close to his Egyptian father falsely claimed to police that he was mentally incapacitated ‘to get him off the hook’.

And he touches on his brother Dodi’s relationship with Princess Diana and how it forced him to consider the dizzying possibility that Harry and William might become his nephews.

But first, as he unzips his padded jacket – he arrived on his motorcycle – Omar grumbles about the weather, joking that he should be semi-impervious to the cold because he is half Finnish.

His widowed mother, Heini Wathen, 69, a former model, is from Helsinki.

Casting a benevolent eye around the room, he declares a love of newspapers, which, he says, he inherited from his father. Whenever he goes to an airport he ‘will literally have a WHSmith bag bursting at the seams with all the newspapers and magazines.

‘I love the opportunity to jump into other worlds and discover news things. And there’s something about being able to cut out articles of interest.’

Certainly, his father has garnered plenty of column inches in recent months. ‘I have read everything,’ says Omar. ‘I prefer to be informed. And I have the disposition to be comfortable with the uncomfortable.’

Much of the coverage must be hard to stomach, even so. Yet Omar seeks neither sympathy nor approval. With so many alleged victims to consider, he wisely prefers not to talk about the impact on himself.

With his father Mohamed Al Fayed, who may have raped and abused more than 111 women over nearly four decades

The billionaire Harrods tycoon, who died last year aged 94, was one of Britain’s most notorious sex offenders

The youngest of Al Fayed’s five children, of which Dodi was the eldest, he has already delivered his verdict on the sexual abuse claims, calling them ‘horrifying’ and saying they ‘called into question’ his loving memory of his father.

But today he is prepared to go further. Perhaps surprisingly he says he feels ‘a degree of relief’ that the alleged crimes are ‘coming to light’.

Only now can he ‘join the dots’ and confirm certain things he perhaps suspected. He makes clear, though, that while he got ‘dirty old man vibes’ from his father, and ‘knew about the call girls’, the extent of his alleged criminality has stupefied him.

He wishes the ‘investigation had been able to take its course when he was still alive’ and points to a lost opportunity in 2017 when police examined abuse allegations.

But, astonishingly, he reveals that others got his father ‘off the hook on the grounds he was mentally incapacitated. Afterwards it was back to business – he was as sharp as a tack.’

At the time his father was approaching 90, but Omar believes age should never be a barrier to prosecution. ‘If a Nazi general is found to have been hiding in the Algarve for the last 50 years then of course he should be tried,’ he says.

He now believes his father was ‘some kind of embodiment of toxic masculinity’. Omar says: ‘I always put my father’s chauvinist approach and manner towards women down to a generational and cultural thing,’ he says. ‘It all became so tiresome and cliched. But what has come out now, well these are very serious allegations.’

He places a heavy, lawyerly emphasis on the word ‘very’.

Omar, centre, with his father Mohamed and sister Camilla at a fashion show in New York 

Was his father, he ponders, motivated ‘by his own perversions’ or ‘disturbances in his human formation?’ Key to understanding his appalling treatment of women, Omar believes, lies in his childhood. ‘He lost his mother at the age of seven and didn’t have any stable female figure in his life growing up,’ he says. ‘We all know how impactful that can be to a child’s psychological development. That was really one of the most fundamental things.

‘The way that he spoke with women, to women, about women was entirely the result of growing up without a mother.

‘It was a tough one to stomach, but he would say to me, “Your mother loves you; I know you love her very much. But she’s just your mother. She was nothing but a womb that gave birth to you. So, listen to me because after God, it is me – and you are my sperm.”’

Omar also attributes what he calls his father’s ‘nest building’ instinct to a motherless childhood. He cites his compulsion to restore ‘giant homesteads’ and cites the family home in Surrey, Villa Windsor in Paris, and a castle in Scotland as examples. ‘They are far beyond the housing requirements that any human being could ever have,’ he says.

Omar’s mother takes a different view of her husband’s sexual appetite. Omar reveals that his father underwent testosterone replacement therapy, which can help with decreased libido and erectile dysfunction. For this, he relied on his personal GP.

‘My mother believes that getting so much extra testosterone exacerbated already problematic tendencies with his lower libido,’ says Omar. ‘For all I know he could have been taking it all his life.’

It is an extraordinary thought – that Al Fayed’s predatory behaviour might have been, in part at least, sustained by his own doctor. Just as it seems twisted that he of all people might have needed help with his libido. Omar cautions: ‘My mother’s view might be over-simplistic and reductionist.’

What soon becomes apparent, as we talk, is that Omar is in many ways the antithesis of his father. Understated rather than flamboyant. Modest and thoughtful, not overbearing. Less inclined to shoot from the hip and cram his sentences with expletives. Friends call him ‘a good dude’ and insist that he in no way conforms to the cliché of the rich man’s spoilt son.

Omar says of his father: ‘Above all, he was always there for me.’ Though the pair clearly held different outlooks on life.

‘I have always been the type of guy who has long-term girlfriends. But he would always make fun of the fact that I had just one girlfriend at a time. He would say, “What are you doing?” ’

His father urged him to play the field, though the advice was expressed in typically obscene fashion. ‘I was sickened,’ says Omar.

Far from turning his son promiscuous, ‘he influenced me the opposite way, like having an alcoholic dad and becoming teetotal’.

Omar Al Fayed with his father Mohamed in 2021. Omar says he loved his father very much and ‘admired his fearlessness’

Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed on holiday on a yacht moored off Italy in 1997

Similarly crude advice was dispensed by his uncle Salah, his father’s younger brother, who himself is accused of sexual assault and trafficking. One woman, a former Harrods employee, says she was drugged and raped by him.

How grotesquely ironic, then, that Salah, who died in 2010, once warned Omar – who was on the board of Harrods in his early 20s and was being groomed to inherit the business – ‘don’t dip your pen in the company ink’.

After resigning from Harrods in 2009, Omar ‘expressed discomfort with consumerist culture’, saying ‘it wasn’t doing anything positive for the future of humanity’.

‘I am sad that victims of these horrific alleged crimes were not able to address them in a timely manner. Maybe then they could have had some form of closure. There might have been some comeuppance, consequences.

‘My father embodied systemic issues – racism and homophobia, among them – and we need to air them as caring human beings.

‘It’s the same with trauma – the first thing we can do is talk about it. If the allegations are genuine and true then these people need any help they can get.’ Omar witnessed at first hand how his father was consumed by appalling grief following the death of his son Dodi and Princess Diana in a Paris car crash in 1997.

‘It decimated him and he was never the same again,’ says Omar. ‘His long drawn out grief bolstered my own independence.’

He doesn’t subscribe to his father’s belief that the couple were killed in an MI6 assassination, however.

But he would like to point out what he sees as a misconception over his father’s motives surrounding Diana. Namely his desperate desire for his son to marry her as a way of sealing his own acceptance into British society.

That was not the case at all, says Omar, who claims that his father never wanted to be part, as many have suggested, of the British Establishment.

‘He was too much of a disruptor,’ he says. ‘He wanted to shock, to change things.’

In any case, he says his father believed that his homeland, Egypt, was the cradle of civilisation with a much older tradition than Britain. ‘A lot of Anglophilic notions were projected upon him but in fact he didn’t want to be English,’ says Omar.

‘He was Egyptian and he wanted to remind Britons of where he believed they came from.

More than anything, he perceived himself to be part of a pharaonic lineage and so he looked at his son literally as a prince – and he just thought Diana was actually the type of woman he should be marrying rather than a ditzy Hollywood girl.’

During Diana’s fateful last holiday on Al Fayed’s yacht in the South of France, Omar, then ten, played with William and Harry who he recalls ‘having a blast’.

‘I did have a water balloon fight with Harry, a full-on rough-and-tumble thing, inside Dad’s £70 million yacht. We were completely raucous. It was broken up by staff and I don’t think Diana ever knew. I was young but I did get a sense, something resonated, that Dodi and Diana were serious.’

Close friends of Diana have suggested otherwise.

‘I remember thinking how strange it would be for William, the future king of England, to be my nephew.’

He returned to school two weeks after the Paris crash to be met by a teacher who burst into tears when he walked into the classroom.

‘I couldn’t take it. I went to the payphone and called my mum to come and pick me up.’

Of the recent sexual allegations against her late husband, Omar’s mother has warned her son – who has a young son himself – in a WhatsApp message: ‘Don’t speak to the press.’

For all that he is wounded now by the ceaseless revelations, Omar says he loved his father very much and ‘admired his fearlessness’.

‘He would always say what was on his mind whether it was accurate or not.

‘That’s always helpful in any relationship. I like to know where I stand with people.’

He speaks warmly of sharing simple things. ‘Sunday afternoons spent drinking tea, watching football and reading the papers,’ he says. ‘That’s how I enjoyed remembering him.’

Yet Omar will find it hard to cleave to memories like these in the coming months as more revelations surrounding Al Fayed’s depravity come to light.

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