My meeting with Mohamed Al Fayed went well. Then I mentioned young women in short skirts – The Irish Times.

I took away two things from the afternoon I spent with Mohamed Al Fayed almost 25 years ago.

The first one turned out to be quite useful in my journalism career. This is a principle that I later called Al Fayed’s Law: the size of a person’s bank account is inversely related to his or her tolerance for criticism.

The second was more of a passing observation, the kind of thing you notice about someone’s surroundings or general behavior and keep it, unsure of its meaning. But I thought it was noteworthy enough to merit inclusion in an article I wrote about him, an article that angered him so much that he publicly announced that he was withdrawing plans to move Harrods’ global online headquarters to Dublin. See Al Fayed’s Law above.

It is worth mentioning here that no one who worked for him was informed of his plan to move his Harrods e-commerce business to Dublin. Or even, as far as I know, his plans to start an e-commerce business. Anyway, something that might never have happened anyway definitely didn’t happen now because I had insulted him.

The line that infuriated him – prompting a flurry of furious emails, threats of legal action and, ultimately, an unhappy breakup with his PR specialist – was about skirts. I thought readers might be interested in something that I found interesting and a little creepy: Al Fayed’s office was staffed by a handful of young, strikingly attractive women who were wearing short skirts on the day of my visit. I was about 20 years old; a few seemed younger than me.

Al Fayed disagreed with this characterization of his personal staff. He insisted that the women working mostly silently keep their pants on during my visit. I was sure the flowing clothes that came down to their knees were skirts.

Until we argued about the edges, I thought my meeting with Al Fayed went quite well: I spent the entire afternoon with him; he took me on a tour of Harrods, posing in front of a grotesque gold statue of himself dressed as a pharaoh, and then returned upstairs to his office. I still have the ugly silk scarf with the horse motif in the Harrods presentation box and the book “Who Killed Diana and Dodie?” He generously gave me the VHS tape on the day of my departure.

I felt sorry for him – a man who, despite his enormous wealth, struck me as paranoid, vulgar, desperate to please the establishment, strangely terrified of germs. Above all, he seemed to be immersed in sadness. It wasn’t up to me to write an article he would like, but I didn’t expect the reaction I would get.

( Mohamed Al Fayed: a false pharaoh whose relationship with the truth – and the British royal family – was strainedOpens in a new window )

He didn’t like that I called him “hysterical” (I meant funny – he said I called him mad); nor my last impression of him, a recently grieving father full of rage, as “a bit pathetic.” But it was the skirts that pushed him over the edge, unleashing fits of rage and accusations that I now suspect would have seemed terrifyingly familiar to those young women in his office, but which I found ridiculous and quite funny.

The skirt row – the skirt, as my colleagues at this newspaper called it – came back to my mind recently when I read the allegations against him. The man I met was not actually the merciful figure I had thought him to be; a sad and isolated old man torn apart by the death of his beloved son, but at the same time a serial predator and rapist on the level of Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein.

In the new BBC documentary and podcast series ‘Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods’, five women claim they were raped by him, with more than 20 later coming forward. The stories keep coming in – with the latest estimate being 37 women who say they were raped by him molested, consulted a lawyer.

( Many women accuse Mohamed Al Fayed of rape and sexual assaultOpens in a new window )

We understand the rules of predators much better now than we did back then; how people like Al-Fayed or Jimmy Savile in the UK, George Gibney or Eamon Casey get away with it by hiding in plain sight. Al Fayed’s power and money fueled his predation, but as with Savile, his general strangeness and studied eccentricity were a useful alibi.

I was touched when I mentioned his preference for young and beautiful women. What I didn’t see was the atmosphere of fear in which they operated. I didn’t see the CCTV cameras that we know were in that office and staff apartment, or the sexual health tests that they – and certainly many of their colleagues – had to work there.

Who else noticed something wrong? Who knew? Who made it easier for him? Who cleaned up after him? The answer is tediously familiar. Lots of people. Al Fayed was questioned by detectives only once – in 2008 in connection with the alleged sexual abuse of a 15-year-old girl; the complaint was subsequently withdrawn. Evidence files about him were later handed over by the police to the British Crown Prosecution Service. He was never charged. British police now allege that between 2005 and 2023, 19 women made allegations against Al Fayed, including three counts of rape. These went nowhere.

He died last year at the age of 94, his life and estate unmarred by the shattered fragments of life he destroyed.

The question that needs to be asked now is not why these women waited until he was dead to come forward, but why they didn’t feel like they could tell their stories while he was alive, or why they tried but weren’t heard. The answer is obvious. Al Fayed assumed that money and status were a protective shield around him, and – a conclusion no less depressing for its inevitability – he was right.