Opinion: Recently, I found myself outside Fulham football ground in west London, speaking to fans about the news that the club’s former owner, the late billionaire businessman Mohamed Al Fayed, has been accused of serial rape and sexual abuse. As one female fan put it, she was deeply shocked, but not really surprised.
The reason she was not unprepared was that so many men with power or influence have now been exposed for similar violations. In Britain, we live in a post-Jimmy Savile age, the period since the disturbing facts of the broadcaster’s decades-long campaign of rape and sexual abuse became known.
Like Al Fayed, who rose to national prominence when he bought Harrods department store in 1985, Savile was never prosecuted for his crimes. He died while still a widely admired figure, celebrated for his extensive charity work.
Al Fayed was also a great charitable benefactor, who, despite his wild conspiracy theories blaming the royal family and MI5 for the death of his son Dodi and Princess Diana, was often portrayed as a harmlessly eccentric figure. Indeed, in the Netflix series The Crown, he is depicted as a proud and essentially decent man.
In reality, he was a depraved monster who terrorised his staff, spied on them, subjected them to invasive medical tests, and, according to testaments from 37 women so far, raped and abused them. That he got away with it is a terrible indictment of the UK criminal justice system’s timidity towards the rich and powerful.
He was protected by an army of lawyers, publicists, and even doctors, all of whom appeared unable to resist the lure of the man’s bottomless bank account.
It’s a depressingly familiar story and this latest iteration has left the nation wondering where the next jaw-dropping revelation will come from.
Savile and Al Fayed are products of generations of misogyny and entitlement.
Anything, it seems, is possible. After all, the BBC’s chief news anchor, Huw Edwards, who solemnly reported the Queen’s death as well as grave bulletins on well-known abusers such as Savile, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, pleaded guilty in July to charges relating to extreme child pornography.
Throw in a host of other less-exalted TV figures (all male) who’ve either been forced to resign or remain under investigation after a variety of sordid accusations and there is a growing sense that with money, power or celebrity comes some unwritten obligation to behave in an obnoxious or sexually aggressive manner.
It’s odd, because we live in an age when we’re told that the gender roles of men and women are cultural constructs that can be swapped or abandoned at the flip of a pronoun, yet the industrial levels of sexual abuse and exploitation, not to mention domestic violence, remain stubbornly and overwhelming weighted in the direction of men doing it to women.
If the #MeToo movement has shifted the dial of the debate ever so slightly, the statistics are unmoving. For rape, the past three years have been the highest on record in England and Wales. Moreover, a British woman is killed by a man on average every two to three days – most of those by current or former partners.
In other words, characters such as Savile and Al Fayed don’t emerge from nowhere. They’re products of generations of misogyny and entitlement.
What is different in their cases is that the brutality and callousness that they inflicted on their victims were camouflaged by celebrity, and they were empowered by wealth and renown.
Al Fayed was actually exposed as a serial abuser in a Vanity Fair profile in 1995, but he launched a libel case that was eventually settled out of court.
It has taken almost 30 years and his death for the truth to emerge. Britain’s Establishment has to explain what it was doing all through that time to gain justice for his victims.
Andrew Anthony is an Observer writer and is married to a New Zealander.
