Earl Spencer says Princess Diana told him Mohamed Al Fayed groped her and made a lewd father-in-law remark early in her romance with Dodi, claims that land as Harrods survivors still fight for real accountability.
In his newly released memoir Swan Song, Diana’s brother Earl Spencer writes that the late princess described a sexual advance by the former Harrods owner with revulsion. The account places the incident early in her romance with Al Fayed’s son, Dodi Fayed, in the summer of 1997.
Spencer’s claim puts a famous name inside a larger pattern of alleged predation that survivors say went on for decades at the luxury London store. Al Fayed died in 2023 at age 94. He never faced a criminal trial on the bulk of the accusations that surfaced after his death.
The Daily Mail reported Spencer’s account of what Diana told him about the encounter.
"Diana disliked Mohamed Fayed. She told me with revulsion how, early in her romance with Dodi, Mohamed had come up to her, dropped a hand onto her buttocks and squeezed them while saying in a leery, suggestive tone: 'And in Egypt, father-in-law gets first go...'."
Spencer added that Diana laughed when she recounted “the ghastliness of the episode,” but that the moment alerted her to “who Dodi’s father really was.”
Spencer ties the introduction to family politics. He writes that his stepmother, Raine, Countess Spencer, built late camaraderie with Mohamed Al Fayed and secured a senior role at Harrods after Spencer’s father died. In the Nineties she sat on Al Fayed’s board.
In Spencer’s telling, that patronage carried a price. He says Raine engineered Diana’s introduction to Dodi and “paid it in full” by bringing the world-famous stepdaughter into the Fayed circle. Diana and Mohamed Al Fayed were photographed together at a Harrods charity dinner in February 1996, well before the summer romance.
Spencer also revisits the short relationship itself. He has said he believes Diana’s fling with Dodi was driven in part by a desire to make another suitor jealous. He once drafted a funeral eulogy that thanked Dodi by name for making Diana happy in her final weeks, then removed the nod. Final images of the couple in Saint-Tropez, days before the crash, showed what Spencer called gentle playfulness.
Diana and Dodi were killed in a Paris car crash in August 1997. Afterward, Al Fayed publicly claimed the Royal Family ordered their deaths, a charge long rejected by official inquiries. Spencer’s memoir has already leveled separate accusations at King Charles and the royal household over how Diana was treated in life and after her death.
Spencer’s Diana claim arrives while women who worked for Al Fayed continue to describe a workplace culture of grooming, threats, and repeated sexual abuse. More than 400 allegations of sexual misconduct have been leveled against Al Fayed and people linked to him, spanning 1977 to 2014.
Cheska Hill-Wood started at Harrods in 1993 at age 19. She told the Press Association the abuse began almost immediately.
"I worked for Harrods for a very short period of time, and the abuse started, the grooming shall we say, it initially started probably on the first day."
Hill-Wood said many women who stayed longer “were abused equally as quickly and repeatedly” and “couldn’t escape.” She called herself one of the luckier ones because she got out.
Jen Mills joined as a management trainee at 16 and later became Al Fayed’s personal assistant. She said she was abused for five years and felt trapped.
"There were many threats made against us. He told us that if we left him, we would never work in London again, and also that we would never be worthy of a job anywhere else, so it became incredibly difficult to leave."
Mills, co-chair of the Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors campaign, said she did not speak openly about the experience until a BBC documentary aired two years ago and brought the scandal into public view.
Harrods ran a redress scheme from March 31, 2025, to the same date this year. Companies House accounts for the department store, made up to January 31 this year and published last month, show the company paid £4.1 million in compensation by the end of January and set aside another £51.8 million for future claims.
The store says it has provided compensation and ongoing support to 113 survivors in the scheme. A Harrods spokesman said the company “supports the bravery of all survivors in coming forward” and encourages them to pursue every avenue, including the police and the Fayed estate. After the scheme closed to new applications, the company said it would keep working through existing claims and that it works closely with the Metropolitan Police on the investigation.
KP Law, which represents more than 275 survivors, said the true value of clients’ claims is likely double or triple what Harrods set aside and could reach £150 million. Mills called the store’s budget decision one made “without ever hearing any of the evidence from any of the women” and said Harrods will “need much deeper pockets.”
Hill-Wood was blunter about the one-year window after decades of silence.
"Now, many of us have been campaigning and shouting for, as I say, nearly 40 years, and a redress scheme is slapped at us with one year. It's a disgrace. It's a disgrace. Plus, what they were offering was not taking survivors seriously. It was an insult."
She said many at a recent gathering outside Harrods never signed up for the scheme.
The Metropolitan Police say they are dealing with at least 159 victims who contacted them directly, including 21 who came forward before Al Fayed’s death in 2023. In November 2024 the force launched Operation Cornpoppy, focused on people who may have facilitated or enabled his crimes.
On Friday, about 30 survivors and supporters gathered outside Harrods in central London on the eve of the second anniversary of the BBC documentary. Dave Robertson, the MP for Lichfield and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Survivors of Fayed and Harrods, joined them with fellow co-chair Wendy Chamberlain MP.
Robertson stressed the scale.
"One of the things that's really important to understand when you're talking about this scandal is the scale of the abuse. There's very clearly a lot of things that went wrong and this is not the actions of one person."
Harrods called the day “undoubtedly a difficult day for all survivors of Fayed” and said it respects their right to be heard while standing by the progress of the past two years.
Spencer’s memoir has also reopened fights over royal choices after Diana’s death, including how the family handled grief, access, and public narrative. Separate coverage has tracked Buckingham Palace’s pushback after Spencer accused King Charles of contempt for the late princess, and the fresh strain placed on Prince William as the book revisits the funeral and family rupture.
Powerful men who treat women as inventory eventually meet the record, even if the reckoning arrives years too late for the people who had to live it.
