Ronnie Gibbons was 20 years old; the captain and face of the first professional women’s team in England at Fulham Football Club.
The 2000-01 season should have been the best to date of the defender’s career, earning money for playing the game she loved with Fulham Ladies and representing the Republic of Ireland at international level.
Yet twice she found herself trapped in a room above the luxury Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, central London, as the club’s billionaire owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, tried to “forcefully” kiss her, made her sit on his knee while he stroked her, then groped her when she tried to get out.
Forty women have complained to the Metropolitan Police about Al Fayed, including making claims of rape and sexual assault between 1979 and 2013, since a BBC documentary last month, Al Fayed: Predator At Harrods, in which 20 female employees said he sexually assaulted or raped them. Twenty-one complaints had been made against the former Harrods owner, who died in 2023, before September’s investigation was published.
Police have started “contacting representatives of other organisations linked to” Al Fayed, but Fulham, the London football club he owned from 1997 to 2013, has not been implicated in his alleged abuse until today.
Now, aged 44, Gibbons has waived her right to anonymity to speak to The Athletic and explain how Al Fayed preyed on her when she was a young professional footballer.
She wants people to hear how she was summoned to visit Al Fayed and how club staff drove her from Fulham’s Motspur Park training ground in New Malden, south-west London, to Knightsbridge in the heart of the city. There, she was twice left alone with a then 71-year-old man with a predilection for young, beautiful, blonde women; someone she, as a long-time Fulham fan, had looked up to as a “grandad” figure.
She wants people to listen to how the door to Al Fayed’s office clicked shut behind her and she froze as he held her arms down by her side, pulled her in and tried to kiss her on the mouth. She wants to speak about how, as the captain of a fledgling women’s side in 2000, she felt a responsibility to her team-mates to suffer Al Fayed’s deeply inappropriate behaviour and not to tell anyone how incredibly uncomfortable she felt, for the benefit of her club.
“I was used,” says Ronnie, tears streaming down her face. “I just felt a huge responsibility on my shoulders because we’d just turned professional. Everything internally was screaming at me, ‘Ronnie, you need to leave’, but I couldn’t because I would be to blame for all these women losing their jobs and Fulham Ladies going down the pan.
“I couldn’t allow anything to happen to me, but at the same time, I couldn’t just run for the hills, which is what I wanted to do.”
Ronnie detailed in two video calls to The Athletic how:
- She was twice summoned to Al Fayed’s office above Harrods on the pretence of speaking to the chairman’s children about football. There were no children there on either occasion.
- She had to answer a stream of questions about her life and football while sitting on his lap as he stroked her knee, and then he forcefully kissed her on the lips as she tried to get out during her first visit.
- She was made to go back to Harrods and this time Al Fayed kissed and then groped her, running his hand down from her face to her waist, and she had to bang on the door to get out.
- She was given gold Harrods chocolates and gifts and an envelope of £50 notes on her first visit, then more cash after the second trip as Al Fayed insisted she must get a taxi home.
- She felt trapped when Al Fayed’s office offered her mother a job as a nurse, which she declined.
- She had to return to the office for a third time for a television interview to promote Fulham Ladies, which left her sweating with discomfort.
- She refused to answer calls from private numbers in case it was Al Fayed and the businessman harassed her at club events, always asking, “Where’s my Ronnie?”.
- She was approached by Max Clifford, the former publicist jailed in May 2014 for a string of indecent assaults on women and young girls, at Fulham’s training ground and he pledged to make her a “superstar”.
“Speaking my truth and finally telling my story will hopefully help me heal and be rid of the shame, embarrassment and pain I have carried for years,” said Ronnie in a message last week. “If this can help one person open up and realise it’s not your fault and be free of the same burdens, then I’ll be happy.
“Helping to save the future generations is so important to me. This can’t happen in any environment. It’s not right. You are not alone and it’s not your fault.”
In 1999-2000, Fulham Ladies were in the third division of English women’s football, with training taking place in the evenings and matches at weekends to allow players to fit in football around school, college commitments or their jobs.
Then, in April 2000, everything changed.
Apparently buoyed by the success of the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the United States, Al Fayed decided to invest in Fulham Ladies, announcing they would become the first professional side in England. Ronnie had been their captain since she was 17 and was one of only six existing players to be given professional contracts as many of the best talents in the European game, such as England internationals Rachel Yankey and Katie Chapman, were signed.
More than two decades on, Ronnie can still barely believe her luck. “It was just unbelievable,” she says. “Absolutely amazing.”
The players’ pay cheques came from Harrods, there was a magazine shoot featuring the women in ball gowns, and the shorts were tight.
“It was just another one of those things that you do when you’re playing women’s football,” says Ronnie, matter-of-factly. “When I played for Ireland, you had to wear the men’s kit and it was all super-baggy and huge, but with Fulham I remember being asked, ‘Do you have to wear such baggy shorts? Can you wear shorts that are a bit tighter or…?’”
Ronnie in 2001 (Getty Images)
She got a modelling gig in the video for the song Toca’s Miracle, released in April 2000, wearing her hair in pigtails as she pretended to be part of a futsal team. She politely shut down initial discussions about playing a lead role, eventually played by Keira Knightley, in Bend It Like Beckham — the 2002 movie about two girls aiming to succeed in professional football against the odds — because she was due to go on holiday. Fulham Ladies still featured in the film and its stars came down to watch training.
She recalls PR man Clifford, who protected Al Fayed for 15 years and died while still in prison in December 2017, visiting the training ground that first season and being told she had to meet him as he pushed his mother around in a wheelchair. Clifford offered to make Ronnie a “superstar”, but she politely declined.
“Instantly, I felt uneasy,” says Ronnie. “There was something just in the way that he looked at me; he was like undressing me with his eyes. I thought, ‘This guy is a creep’.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to be a superstar. I just want to play football’.”
On the pitch, Fulham Ladies flew, reaching consecutive FA Cup finals and beating Doncaster Belles to lift the trophy in front of 10,000 fans at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park ground in 2002 after defeat by Arsenal there 12 months earlier.
Al Fayed was the man credited with funding and supporting the whole groundbreaking endeavour. Ronnie, a Fulham fan since she was 10, had watched him swinging his scarf around his head before men’s matches at Craven Cottage, the west London side’s stadium, after he bought the club in 1997. She first met him at a press event to launch the women’s professional team at the ground in April 2000. He hugged her “and stayed in too long”, she remembers.
She was told to wear her blonde hair down for the photographs and, when she questioned why, she was told: “Oh, Mr Fayed has requested it.”
Ronnie, front left, with Al Fayed and Fulham team-mates in April 2000 (Getty Images)
“He held the purse strings, so everyone’s position was kind of in his hands,” says Ronnie. “But it was quite common knowledge what he was like.
“Even from the first time you met Mohamed Al Fayed, he was a bit touchy-feely, a bit of the dirty old man, that generational thing. You could get away with it more then. He would hug you a bit longer than he should. That’s how he got his kind of pleasure, those tiny little things.
“I had blonde hair, I was slim, I was called the ‘David Beckham of women’s football’ in the media… Everyone knew Fayed liked women or girls with blonde hair.”
Their next encounter came at the club’s training ground after Al Fayed arrived in a helicopter to meet the women’s team.
“We shook hands,” says Ronnie. “He said, ‘Lovely to meet you’ and I said, ‘Hey Mo, how you going?’
“There were gasps, I remember, from people… I didn’t even think about it. I would just always speak to people very normally, I didn’t put him on a pedestal. He was like, ‘I like this girl’ straight away. That was the first thing he said: ‘I like this girl’.
“That was the start of my whole thing with Mr Fayed.”
In the summer of 2000, after training one day at Motspur Park, Ronnie was asked to go to Harrods by a member of Fulham’s staff.
“He told me that Mr Fayed wanted me to go to Harrods to meet two of his children and speak to them about his new business in Fulham Ladies,” says Ronnie.
Ronnie says others at the club encouraged her to go and she was driven there the next day by a club employee.
This is what she says happened when she arrived at Al Fayed’s offices, on one of the upper floors of the famous department store.
“I just remember I walked in and the door was open for me,” she says. “I was in my Fulham tracksuit. I remember feeling like I was in a place full of models, mostly female staff, and thinking, ‘Wow, everyone is so good-looking in here’. There was no talk, it was all very quiet and subdued. I was told to sit down and Mohamed Al Fayed would be with me shortly.
“I felt kind of excited. I was at Harrods, meeting this guy who has done this amazing thing for Fulham Ladies and he’s chairman of Fulham Football Club, my team, who I’ve supported for over 10 years. He’s the main guy, the man of the moment.
Al Fayed before a Fulham match at Craven Cottage (Getty Images)
“I was summoned to his office and I don’t know if the door automatically closed or it was closed behind me, but I went in and it was just him. His children weren’t there. It was supposed to be his daughter and one of his sons. But there was nobody there. I was a bit like, ‘This is a bit weird’.
“He said, ‘Oh, I’m very sorry, there was a security breach and my children couldn’t come’.
“Then he pulled me in close and tried to kiss me on the mouth. He had his arms holding my arms, like at my side so I couldn’t push him away or anything like that. It was a real kind of control stance, like ‘I’m dominating you’.
“He held my arms, pulled me in and tried to kiss me on the mouth. I sort of moved my head so he could only kiss me on the cheek. I was wearing my Fulham tracksuit and just felt sweat instantly on the back of my neck. Just so uncomfortable, instantly. I kind of froze, I think.”
She remembers Al Fayed was wearing “one of those loud shirts, with a pattern like how you used to have the wallpaper in pubs” and suit trousers. He sat down on a chair “and kind of pulled me on top of him to sit on his lap” as he talked to Ronnie about football.
“I was just like, ‘What do I do here?’,” she says. “I just felt like a huge responsibility on my shoulders at that point because we’d just turned professional.”
She wanted to run but the door was closed and the questions kept coming.
“Have I got a boyfriend? How old is he? Where do I live? Who do I live with? ‘I’ll buy you an apartment’, he said to me. ‘I’ll buy you an apartment in Park Lane or Knightsbridge’. ‘What car do you drive? I’ll buy you a car’. I was just like, ‘This is actually crazy’.”
Ronnie says she wanted to appear grateful for his investment in the women’s team but “didn’t want him to think I owed him anything”. She tried to distract him by mentioning a picture of Al Fayed with Queen Elizabeth II at a horse-racing meeting on his wall. Al Fayed’s son, Dodi, died in the 1997 car crash that also killed Diana, Princess of Wales, the Queen’s former daughter-in-law.
“I remember looking at it and saying, ‘Oh, that’s a lovely photo’,” says Ronnie. “He was like, ‘No, that woman is a b***h’.
“We spoke for a bit longer,” Ronnie continues. “I was sat on his lap and he was kind of rubbing my side, rubbing my arm, had his hand on my leg, kind of like subtly. It was very soft and almost like while you’re talking maybe you’ll forget it’s going on. Obviously, you can’t forget it’s going on, but it’s not aggressive.”
She says she frantically tried to think of reasons to leave, then got up off his lap to walk to the door.
“He again tried to forcefully kiss me and I think he even may have stuck his tongue on me or something,” she says, grimacing at the memory. “I just remember feeling sick, just really physically feeling sick, when I left there.”
Even then, she could not get out. She says Al Fayed handed her a sealed envelope which he said contained cash for a taxi home. He also gave her gold Harrods-branded bars of chocolate and a bag with perfume and gifts in it, even though she tried to refuse it all.
“He said, ‘No, no, you must. I brought you here, you’ve got no way of getting home, you must take this envelope’. He gave me this little gift bag that had perfumes and stuff in there. He said, ‘Give this to your mum. This is a gift from me, I want you to have it, thank you for coming to Harrods. Sorry my kids weren’t here, we’ll arrange it for another day when they’re here’.
“I was just like, ‘Oh no, I’ll have to come back here again’.”
She says Al Fayed watched her walk past the silent women at their desks in the corridor outside and then Ronnie got outside to feel the “cool air” on her face. Inside the envelope was £500 or £600 in crisp £50 notes.
“I felt like I’d had a lucky escape,” she says, “that I managed to get away without really upsetting him but without having to go through it. I felt absolutely very, very uncomfortable, very intimidated and (like there was) a whole heap of responsibility on my shoulders.”
Ronnie told her mother she had been to Harrods and gave her the gifts and some cash, but she did not elaborate on what had happened in Al Fayed’s office. She revealed a little more to her team-mates and was shocked to find some of them encouraged her to go back; to “go with him, think of what you could get out of it”.
“I could never do that,” she says. “That’s not who I am, ever. However much money or whatever, not for one second did that enter my brain.”
Al Fayed, however, had different ideas.
Later during that summer of 2000, Ronnie was in a pub in Wimbledon watching football with friends. Her phone rang. It was a woman calling, saying she had Mr Fayed on the line.
Ronnie assumed it was a wind-up, but then he started talking in his distinctive Egyptian accent, which she can still mimic rather well two decades on.
“‘Hello, my darling! Where have you been? Why have you not come to see me? I miss you! You need to come and see me! Why haven’t you been in contact?’ etc.”
The busy pub erupted after a goal was scored and Ronnie managed to end the call without seeming rude, but there was no escape. The next day, she went to Motspur Park and was told that, after training, she had to pop home to get her black gameday tracksuit on and then go back to Harrods to see Al Fayed and his children.
“I knew it was coming after the phone call, but I wasn’t expecting it so soon and I didn’t have time to say no,” she says. “It was, ‘After training today, you’re going’. Again, (I was) being told you’re going, it’s not a choice, this is your duty.
“I just remember trying to think of an excuse and again it was just a real responsibility on my shoulders.”
Ronnie says she was again driven to Knightsbridge by Fulham employees, who left her alone before she walked upstairs.
“Instantly I felt so uncomfortable, I just wanted to run,” she says. “He came out of his office and was like, ‘Oh, my darling, you came to see me!’ He wasn’t even trying to hide it.
“We went into his office, no children there again. I kind of knew (there wouldn’t be) after the first time… Again, it was some excuse.
“Going in, he tried to kiss me on the mouth again. Again, it was asking lots of questions and lots of sexual talk. He told me he could look after me, that I must be fit, that I can keep him fit and healthy.
“He asked me if I wanted to go to his son’s birthday party. Tonight. I was like, ‘No, I can’t go to that, I’m in my Fulham tracksuit’. He was like, ‘I have a department store, you can go and buy whatever you want!’
“He asked me lots of personal questions about my family… Obviously, in hindsight, it was a way of him having knowledge of me and if I spoke out or anything, then it would be, ‘Well, I know your family, I know where you live’. I felt sort of backed in a corner in a way and I had to reveal a certain extent.”
Ronnie explained her mother was a nurse and Al Fayed said “she must come to work for me in Harrods”.
In the past month, former Harrods employees have complained they were subjected to invasive medical tests when Al Fayed owned the company. Ronnie’s mum was subsequently contacted, went for a job interview in Knightsbridge and was offered a role at Harrods, which she declined.
“I was made to feel very uncomfortable,” says Ronnie, shuddering again. “He was rubbing my back, putting his hand on my leg, telling me all the things he could do for me. In my head I was like, ‘I’m not doing this’.”
She made her excuses and tried to get to the door.
“This time he groped me,” she says. “I remember kind of knocking on the door. As he was saying goodbye, he was sort of grabbing me, trying to sort of hold onto me and kiss me. He was like, ‘You’re not scared are you? You don’t need to be scared, I’m not going to do anything like that, you’re very precious, you’re a very special girl’.
“Then he groped my breast. He sort of had his hand on my face and he moved it down and he sort of touched me on my breast and sort of moved his hand down to my waist.”
Ronnie banged on the door. She remembers Al Fayed looking angry when someone opened it from the other side, pushing the door closed again and saying, “No, no, no, you can’t go yet, I haven’t given you your gifts.”
He tried to give Ronnie another envelope of £50 notes, which she refused. This one was not sealed, so he took £100 out and insisted she get a taxi home to south-west London rather than go by train.
“I took the money because I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could,” she says. “I got outside and just started to cry. I just remember crying.”
There was a third visit to Harrods, but this time Ronnie was not left alone with Al Fayed.
A broadcaster asked Fulham if it could interview her and the Fulham chairman at his department store and so, “of course”, off they went: three men and Ronnie.
“They interviewed him and he was like, ‘I love Ronnie’ and then, ‘I love all ladies’ — he’s saying in the interview. They’re asking me about him and you can see I’m sweating, you can see my face. Just being there made me uncomfortable.
“I’m talking about how great this guy is because he made us the first professional women’s team. It was just bulls*** really, saying how good it was.”
She refused to go back to Knightsbridge after that, despite being asked by the club to go again. She blanked calls from private numbers in case they were from Al Fayed’s office and avoided him at an end-of-season party at Harrods in May 2001.
“He was looking for me everywhere, hounding me, asking players, ‘Where’s my Ronnie?’,” she says. “Trying to chase me around this party at Harrods and I’m hiding behind buffet tables. It was like some kind of joke. This grown man who’s chasing me around this party. Completely bizarre.
“I always made sure I was around people, never alone, always sat with people or stood chatting to people and always watching out for him. That went on for the rest of the time we were professional (until 2003). Every function, every meeting, he would try to find me. I was so mindful of it I would never, ever be alone at any of those things.”
Ronnie lost the captaincy at the end of the 2000-01 season when Gaute Haugenes was appointed as manager. So, for the remainder of her two seasons at Fulham, before she joined fellow London side Charlton Athletic, there was no excuse for Al Fayed to ask to see her.
Ronnie was angered last month, however, when she read Haugenes had told the BBC that Fulham “protected the players”. “We were aware he liked young, blonde girls,” the Norwegian added. “So we just made sure that situations couldn’t occur.”
“The fact he said, ‘Yeah, we protected them’ is just nonsense,” says Ronnie, adding that Haugenes’ comments were part of the reason she has decided to speak out now. “Gaute wasn’t the manager the first season when I had those meetings at Harrods but… he would definitely have known that Fayed had a thing for me.”
Haugenes — whose wife, Olympic gold medallist Margunn Haugenes, played for Fulham from 2000-2003 — said: “I want to apologise to Ronnie if my comments about protecting hurt her in any way. I’m sorry in the strongest way of the word. It might have been me, it might have been the language barrier or whatever — whether I don’t pick up those small details, I don’t know. But this is completely shocking news for me and I hope she is well.”
Fulham Football Club said in a statement: “We unequivocally condemn all forms of abuse. We remain in the process of establishing whether anyone at the club is, or would have been, impacted by Mohamed Al Fayed in any manner as described in recent reports. Should any person wish to share information or experiences related to this matter, we urge them to contact the police or the club at safeguarding@fulhamfc.com.”
Harrods said it did not comment on individual cases and referred us to its statement issued last month: “We are utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed. These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms. We also acknowledge that during this time his victims were failed and for this, we sincerely apologise.”
Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans in the UK free any time, from any phone, on 116 123. Click here to contact them from the U.S.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton and Ray Orr)
