Joanna Brittan recalls watching the English countryside blur beyond the window of the limousine.
She was too stunned to absorb the scenery. Earlier that day, the 25-year-old had been abruptly dismissed from her role as translator and personal assistant to a senior United Arab Emirates diplomat.
While clearing out her desk, Joanna said she was reminded by her superiors of the strict confidentiality terms in her contract. She was then escorted out onto the street in Knightsbridge.
A limousine was waiting nearby, and she was waved inside. Behind the wheel was a chauffeur; in the vehicle sat the man who had overseen her dismissal, her employer, diplomat Ahmed Obaidly.
Joanna later recalled: ‘I’m crying. I come out of the office. Obaidly’s waiting with his chauffeur. I’m told to get in the limo. The chauffeur locks the doors. I can’t open them. And we start driving out of London.’
Obaidly remained silent. As the journey continued, Joanna said her distress gave way to a growing sense of fear.
The car eventually entered the lengthy driveway of a country estate. Joanna says she noticed armed men dressed in combat clothing concealed among the trees and bushes.
At the entrance to the house, a deeply tanned, weathered man was waiting for them.
Joanna recognised him immediately. She had met him before: Mohamed Al-Fayed.
The Daily Mail’s new podcast series, Al-Fayed: Who Looked Away?, examines allegations that the former Harrods owner was a prolific abuser, drawing comparisons with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein
Joanna Brittan, pictured in the 1990s, says she was a victim of sexual abuse and trafficking
The year was 1990, and Fayed, then 61, was a prominent public figure. The owner of Harrods, he moved in influential circles and was connected to celebrities, members of the royal family and Joanna’s boss, Obaidly.
Joanna had previously visited Fayed’s offices with Obaidly, but she could not understand why they had been taken to the businessman’s Surrey estate in Oxted.
According to Joanna’s account, the purpose of the visit was for one or both men to sexually abuse her.
The wider significance of what happened became clear to her only decades later, in the late 2010s, after a conversation with a woman whose name had become known around the world: Virginia Giuffre.
Giuffre, who died in 2025, became one of the most prominent figures to expose the scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and exploitation.
As one of Epstein’s best-known accusers, she helped reveal allegations of an international network that supplied young women and girls to him and other powerful associates.
Joanna happened to be in contact with Giuffre shortly before the now notorious BBC Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew in November 2019, in which his relationship with the convicted sex offender was examined.
Prince Andrew has consistently denied wrongdoing and has never been convicted of offences connected with Epstein or Giuffre.
By then 54, Joanna reached out to Giuffre on social media after hearing her speak repeatedly about being groomed while she was a vulnerable young woman.
As the women exchanged messages online, they shared their stories. Virginia praised Joanna as ‘a beautiful soul’, telling her that she was ‘here for you any time’.
Joanna was in contact with the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre (pictured) shortly before the infamous 2019 Prince Andrew interview
Virginia helped Joanna see the wider picture of what happened to her that day in Fayed’s country mansion. There, Joanna believes she was drugged over lunch by Obaidly and Fayed.
A complete void exists in her mind, so blank she believes it can only have been drug-induced.
She believes she was then sexually abused by one or both men. She has no idea how long she was kept on the estate for, or indeed any recollection of the immediate aftermath at all.
But while Joanna called it ‘abuse’, Virginia used a different word to describe what happened to her.
As I reveal in the Daily Mail’s new blockbuster podcast Al-Fayed: Who Looked Away?, Virginia helped Joanna understand that, like her, she had been a victim of ‘trafficking’ – a crime considered more serious than sexual abuse alone – and encouraged her to seek justice.
In the podcast I document how significant evidence points to Fayed being no less than the British Epstein, in both the scale and systematic nature of his abuse.
Like Epstein, he permitted rich and powerful men to use his businesses, his luxurious homes and even his superyachts as hunting grounds for young women, who were trafficked across international borders to be abused.
It’s no secret there were many female victims of Fayed, who died in 2023 aged 94: it’s been said there are 500 from Harrods alone, aged 15 and up.
Earlier this week, a law firm representing more than 275 survivors warned that compensation claims could top £150 million, more than double the amount the department store has set aside.
I believe 500 victims is the bare minimum. I worked on Harrods’ shop floor myself when I was 19, in 2007, and the female workforce was extremely transient. Employees came and went at pace.
With this in mind, and considering Fayed’s international reach, I believe it’s no exaggeration to put his total number of victims at double that estimate or more.
Meanwhile, American law enforcement agencies estimate the number of Epstein victims as around 1,200. It’s no surprise then that there’s more than one link between the two men.
According to the Epstein files, he regularly used private jet terminals owned by Fayed, under the company name Harrods Aviation.
Private airport terminals avoid the need for standard immigration checks, making it easier to move women between countries for sexual exploitation.
One survivor, using the name Natalie, told an interviewer earlier this year she was sent to Fayed by Epstein, in the summer of 1997.
He told her to travel to Fayed’s yacht, the Jonikal, off St Tropez and that meeting Fayed was a ‘good opportunity’. Like many other women, she was assaulted on that yacht.
This, of course, was the summer when Princess Diana holidayed on the yacht with her boyfriend, Fayed’s son Dodi, shortly before their deaths, though Natalie did not recall seeing the couple.
Epstein, who had a Parisian apartment, also swam in the pool at the Ritz Paris, which Fayed bought in 1979 and is still owned by the Al-Fayed family trust. French newspapers have reported Epstein was often accompanied there by ‘jeunes femmes’.
The biggest similarity, though, is that their crimes were not closely guarded secrets. People knew.
And yet Epstein’s debauched lifestyle continued for decades, until he was eventually arrested in July 2019. He was found dead in his prison cell the next month.
Fayed, too, was never brought to justice, with the full scale of his crimes only exposed after his death. Today, many people, rightly or wrongly, have been publicly implicated in his case.
Those named include Kelly Walker-Duncalf, who worked for 15 years as a recruiter at Harrods.
In a 2025 TV documentary, former staff referred to her as ‘Al-Fayed’s Fixer’, recruiting young women on his behalf. At least three survivors claimed she had personally introduced them to Fayed.
Mohamed Al-Fayed was no less than the British Jeffrey Epstein, Nicola Thorp writes
When the documentary crew approached Ms Walker-Duncalf, she issued a statement through her lawyer, saying she wasn’t aware of Fayed’s crimes and didn’t facilitate them.
Michael Ward became managing director of Harrods in 2005 and worked for years under Fayed.
Today, Ward has apologised on behalf of Harrods to Fayed’s victims but denies any knowledge of abuse and has said no formal complaints were ever brought to him.
There is no direct evidence Ward personally knew about Fayed’s crimes. He remains the managing director of Harrods, which was sold by Fayed in 2010.
Dr Ann Coxon, meanwhile, is one of the doctors accused of carrying out sexual health checks on Harrods employees and passing confidential results to Fayed. Dr Coxon has categorically denied allegations and remains a doctor in good standing.
Dr Coxon, Ms Walker-Duncalf and Mr Ward have never been charged with any criminal offences. But there must be others who know more about Fayed’s modus operandi.
The story of Carrie, who was 20 when she got a summer job at Harrods in 1994 working in ladies’ fashion, illustrates the layers of complicity surrounding Fayed’s actions.
After just two weeks Carrie was taken to Fayed’s office by his security team to meet him. He became fixated by her.
She was made to get a sexual examination at a private medical facility and told me ‘the next day I was called into [Fayed’s] office, [and] sat on his knee. He looked through my medical reports and told me I was dirty, and that I was on the Pill… I shouldn’t be having any sex and he was my boyfriend.’
One of the sites of abuse repeatedly mentioned by survivors is a building Fayed owned on Park Lane, comprising offices where Harrods staff would occasionally work and his personal apartments.
Survivors of Fayed’s abuse outside Harrods in London on Friday to mark the second anniversary of the BBC documentary about his conduct
Carrie was sent there and told me: ‘I thought I was being taken to [do] some extra work. He told me to meet him on this top floor and I was escorted upstairs.
‘As I went through these doors, they locked behind you. I remember slightly panicking. There were two glasses of champagne on the table and lots of extravagant gifts – Chanel No5 perfume and outfits.
‘And he emerges in a satin dressing gown that’s open. He’s completely naked underneath… I remember my heart racing because I realised I was not in a situation I could have any control over.’
Fayed began assaulting Carrie. She only escaped by lying, telling him her father was waiting for her outside.
Then there were the many times police did not act against him, despite reports of his crimes.
Our podcast uncovered shocking examples of this, including what happened to Joanna. Her full story makes particularly uncomfortable reading.
Educated in British private schools, Joanna’s parents were based in the Middle East, where her father worked as a pilot.
In 1990 she went to work for the Al Nahyan family in London. The royal dynasty which controls Abu Dhabi is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
She was assigned to Obaidly – a tall, well-dressed, well connected diplomat – in offices right behind Harrods.
‘I thought, how lucky am I? I’ve fallen on my feet,’ Joanna told me softly.
But shortly after starting work, her office manager told her she’d be getting a sexual health check.
‘She made it very clear I had no choice if I wanted to keep my job,’ Joanna recalls.
Joanna was alone in London. She also wanted to keep her job, so reluctantly acquiesced. ‘It was literally a gynae exam, bloods, [checking for] STDs,’ she recalls.
Meanwhile Obaidly, some 40 years Joanna’s senior, constantly propositioned her, making lewd comments. Then he took her to the south of France to inspect properties owned by the royal families located in millionaire enclaves.
She told me: ‘I remember just feeling like nobody knows I’m here. There’s no mobile phones. You know, it’s very frightening.’
Joanna Brittan, pictured at Dartington Estate Gardens, Devon, has waived her right to anonymity in the hope that other victims may come forward
After a meeting with the mayor of Cannes, Joanna was taken to a penthouse Obaidly owned. She remembers him seizing her and trying to rape her but she managed to fight him off.
Still not knowing what to do, Joanna continued with the trip. When they returned to London, he raped her multiple times at his house.
There’s no suggestion any members of the Abu Dhabi royal family knew about or condoned Obaidly’s abuse of Joanna. But his association with them meant there was a huge power imbalance.
Not long after he raped her, Obaidly took Joanna to Harrods – to the chairman’s suite, where she met Fayed.
‘I remember being there with Obaidly and Fayed and having tea and coffee in the Arabic fashion with very delicate china and a cake stand with little petit fours.
‘They were talking Arabic and discussing me because they were looking at me.
‘I felt, looking back, that I was being paraded as a trophy.’
It was soon after that Joanna was sacked by Obaidly and taken to Fayed’s country estate.
They had lunch – she remembers Fayed shaving truffle onto a pasta dish which, he told her, was ‘pound for pound more valuable than gold’. She was taken to meet his children.
Then, he told her she was going to live there – as nanny to his children. It was presented to her as a fait accompli, something the two men had decided between them.
She remembers laughing it off: ‘I’m thinking to myself, “Why don’t you have Norland nannies who are trained?”‘
Her laughter enraged both Obaidly and Fayed, to the extent that both men began shouting in her face.
But after that, she remembers nothing. Not what happened next, or how she got away. Her amnesia could be drug-induced – though this kind of memory gap is also common in survivors of traumatic abuse.
She never saw either man again and buried her trauma, before leaving London in 1999 to start a family and move on with her life.
Then, in 2017 she saw a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary which interviewed several women who said they’d been assaulted by Fayed.
Bravely, Joanna contacted her local police station who passed her to the Metropolitan Police. They told her no further action would be taken. Obaidly had died in 2015 and, they said, there was insufficient evidence to do anything about Fayed.
However, they reassured Joanna they would keep her report on file. If another woman came forward, they might have a case. It was essentially ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ – which they never did.
Now 61, Joanna was 25 years old when she first met Fayed after being fired from her job by diplomat Ahmed Obaidly
But, as we reveal in the podcast, another of Fayed’s victims had also seen Dispatches and had also contacted police not long after Joanna to report her assault.
She was also told nothing could be done but ‘as soon as another woman comes forward, we’ll let you know’. She, too, heard nothing. How many women were told the same?
After Fayed’s death, the Met confirmed they received allegations against him from 21 women between 2005 and 2023. They said they presented material to the Crown Prosecution Service on five different occasions. Yet Fayed was never charged.
Was this just a failure to connect the dots? Or something more?
Certainly, Fayed worked hard to shut down allegations of his abuse. One man assisted in particular – Harrods’ head of security, former policeman John Macnamara.
He had spent 28 years with the Met, achieving the rank of detective chief superintendent.
By 1994 he was the linchpin of Fayed’s ‘security operations’.
Multiple survivors have claimed Macnamara personally threatened them to stop them talking about their abuse. His team is also alleged to have bugged phones, intercepted calls and even broken into houses.
I spoke to women who were still afraid to name Macnamara in public, even though he died in 2015.
Throughout his time as Fayed’s head of security, Macnamara retained links to the police.
He invited officers for drinks at the store and allegedly distributed Harrods hampers to those who were friendly.
He also reportedly continued to attend the Christmas party at his former station.
Joanna with her mother during the time she was a victim of trafficking in the 1990s
In 1994, when a former nanny made an accusation of sexual assault against Fayed, she was suddenly arrested on charges of theft. It was alleged Macnamara had arranged trumped-up charges to intimidate her. In the end she was not charged and later received £12,000 compensation from Fayed.
All these stories stink of corruption. But they wouldn’t be widely known until after Fayed’s death, because through the 90s and 2000s he consistently intimidated and silenced journalists, with the help of his expensive lawyers.
So much has still yet to be explored. Reporting has focused on Harrods but it’s alleged that women were also procured through the Ritz Paris, and reportedly at Fulham Football Club, which he bought in 1997.
Fayed also bought a school – West Heath in Sevenoaks, Kent, where Princess Diana once attended. Last year a book alleged Fayed used it to procure underage girls.
Harrods’ immediate response to the allegations made after Fayed’s death was to say ‘these were the actions of an individual’. But from what we now know, that individual must have been enabled by others.
The victims of Fayed are ordinary women, with jobs and families. They are fighting on, trying to get the Government to acknowledge the depth of Fayed’s depraved regime and how they were trafficked, just as Virginia Giuffre was.
A few – including Joanna Brittan – have finally been recognised as trafficking victims by the Home Office.
But in an Alice In Wonderland-style farce, despite having identified them as victims of trafficking, police say they cannot yet reclassify Fayed’s crimes as trafficking, rather than ‘just’ sexual assault.
This is more than just semantics: with a trafficking categorisation comes more resources, more legal firepower and stronger penalties for those who are complicit. Fayed’s victims deserve this justice.
Episodes 1 and 2 of Al-Fayed: Who Looked Away? are available everywhere, or become a member of The Crime Desk to listen to the entire series immediately along with our other award-winning true crime podcasts. Visit thecrimedesk.com
As told to Maureen Brookbanks
