When the Going Was Good, page 33
In 2018, when the Brown series was published, Ward jumped on the Epstein bandwagon with relish, churning out stories, a podcast, and even a television documentary that portrayed her as the truth-seeker and us at the magazine—and me in particular—as malign gatekeepers keeping truth at bay. We all found this a bit rich. As indeed did the two sisters whom Ward wanted to include in that original story. One of them told the New York Post that she was so fed up with Ward “profiting” from their stories that she sent her a cease-and-desist letter. “I am horrified,” the woman said. “Just leave us alone! Can’t she make money off of other victims? She’s a ‘presstitute’ and vulture…. She won’t stop torturing us, and it is hurting so badly. Whenever we hear the name ‘Vicky Ward,’ we cringe.”
Chapter 19.
The Long Arm of the Law
Libel battles are prolonged, expensive, and draining slogs. And brutally time-consuming. I have been through two of them.
The biggest libel case of my editorship at Vanity Fair was brought by Mohamed al-Fayed, then the owner of both the Harrods department store and the Paris Ritz. From beginning to end, the whole affair lasted two years. And I must tell you, spending a portion of every week coming up with evidence to fight a serious libel action isn’t as fun as it sounds.
Maureen Orth had written a profile of Fayed (the “al” was tagged on in the ’70s) for the September 1995 issue of the magazine. The title of her report was “Holy War at Harrods.” When it came out, Fayed sued us for our allegations of his sexual harassment of female employees and his use of charitable donations to stifle official criticism of him. He also sued us for our allegations that he used a secret surveillance apparatus to keep an eye on staff and visitors. And he sued us over our allegations of his racism. In her story, Maureen had cited numerous cases of unfair dismissal, enforced HIV tests for female staff, the bugging of phones, and his general “management by fear.”
When I commissioned Maureen to write the story, I’d been reading a lot about Fayed. And I was generally on his side. (It wasn’t then public knowledge that he had been using Britain’s famously plaintiff-friendly libel laws to stifle any negative comment about him or his family.) I felt he was the subject of institutional racism in Britain, both from the establishment and the London broadsheets. I felt he was being held at arm’s length because he was not like them. He hadn’t gone to Eton. He didn’t have a cut-glass accent. He didn’t know the rules. He was Egyptian, and to the ruling Oxbridge set, he looked funny and spoke funny. Fayed tried desperately to ingratiate himself through philanthropy, straight cash donations to politicians, and finally, and tragically, by pushing his son Dodi into the arms of Princess Diana. He had been furious when Conservative prime minister John Major’s government had refused his request to become a British citizen. His revenge? He divulged the names of three ministers in Major’s cabinet who had taken cash from him in return for asking questions on his behalf in Parliament or who had stayed for free at the Ritz. The establishment’s response was that it was Fayed’s fault that so many British politicians were venal. The whole thing was laughable. I saw Fayed as the classic British outsider and perhaps not the monster that the British press was portraying him as.
Halfway through her assignment, Maureen called to say that we had a very different story on our hands. The British papers, she believed, had actually been overly generous. The man was a monster. And a litigious one who had buried accusations against him with flurries of libel writs. Maureen had the story of a racist and a serial sexual harasser, a man surrounded by goons and enforcers who had cowed his victims into silence or bought them off, and who had muzzled the press with gag orders and threats of withholding Harrods’ considerable advertising budget.
Fayed couldn’t believe that the British Conservative Party, to which he had made so many donations, official and unofficial, had turned against him. There was a time when its mandarins purred in his presence, hoping for scraps from his bank account. Margaret Thatcher’s government had waved through his audacious coup to buy Harrods in 1985 with little scrutiny from the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Later, enough evidence of impropriety reached them to trigger a report by the Department of Trade and Industry, whose conclusions were devastating. “The Fayeds [Mohamed had two brothers, Ali and Salah] dishonestly misrepresented their origins, their wealth, their business interests and their resources,” it stated.
This was damning stuff. The British government suppressed the report for as long as it could—no doubt out of fear that it would reflect as badly on itself as it would on Fayed—and never prosecuted him based on its disclosures. Instead, it refused Fayed citizenship, which requires evidence of “good character.” When she interviewed Fayed for the story, Maureen put to him the rumor that he wanted to become a member of the House of Lords. “I don’t want that,’’ he said. “But they didn’t also say thank you for everything I have done. It’s the opposite. They just could shit on me, everyone.” He had named the cabinet ministers who accepted cash to ask questions on his behalf in order to take his revenge, he said, “to show people who really runs this country, what quality they are…. These days it’s only the trash people.” The Department of Trade and Industry report drove him crazy; he called it worthless and shocking. “I make revolution,” he told Maureen. “The devastating thing is the class system, created of people who think they are above the rest of the human race. They think they can shit just on anyone. They think I’m a wog.” Members of the British establishment who had accepted his favors were astounded by the recitation of facts in Maureen’s piece.
As it turned out, we only knew a portion of it. We learned so much more about Fayed during discovery, as we built a case to defend ourselves. One of our barristers at the time, who would become an appeals court judge, later told our London editor, Henry Porter, that Maureen’s story was so well done and backed up that, in his opinion, our case was won before we ever began this process. But that’s not what we believed at the time.
British libel law is markedly different from libel law in the United States. In America, the burden is on the person suing to prove not only that an allegation is false but that the news organization knew that what it was printing was false or at least probably false and published it anyway, with malice aforethought. In Britain, the burden is on the news organization to prove that what it said was true. The plaintiff need not prove anything other than harm. That’s why winning libel cases in Britain is so much easier than it is in the United States.
For eighteen months, we prepared to defend ourselves. Henry was instrumental in gathering our defense, digging up fresh evidence, finding witnesses, and attempting to nail it all down. He did little else during that period. We’d have a weekly chat when Henry would bring me up to speed—information I would deliver to Si during our fortnightly lunches. We were in good hands on the legal front. In London, we had David Hooper, from Biddle & Co. And in New York, we had an astute lawyer in Jerry Birenz, who worked for the firm that handled all the Newhouse businesses. Robert Walsh, our legal editor in New York, and Rich Bernstein, a partner at Vanity Fair’s legal firm, were involved every step of the way. As the trial date approached, we examined our findings. It was a wealth of new material. We had new witnesses and thousands of pages of fresh evidence.
What we discovered was truly shocking. It was a mistake for Fayed to have sued on four counts. It meant that we could legitimately investigate four areas of his life, and if in one of those areas we could prove our case, it would compromise the rest of his libel suit. Sexual harassment was almost the easiest. Fayed had been serially abusive and predatory to a host of young women who came to work for him. If they refused his advances, he would persecute them or fire them. Any who walked out were followed by threats to muzzle them.
Fayed settled harassment cases out of court with money and gag orders. Women who came to work for him were subjected to medical examinations to see if they had HIV or any other diseases. Once hired, they would be plied with gifts, then pounced on. Women in his employment would frequently be subjected to abusive, misogynistic language. One affidavit described Fayed asking a female employee in his office, “Who did you fuck this weekend?” When she refused to answer, he asked her whether she was “into girls.” Fayed terrorized his staff, keeping them in a constant state of fear. Henry found many female former employees who were willing to sign affidavits about his behavior. He tracked down one of them—a hearty New Zealander nanny who was working as a hiking guide—to a fax machine in the Himalayas. She was a key witness and willingly agreed to describe Fayed’s repellent advances. We also got testimony from many of the managers he’d fired—one of whom ended up in prison in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, after Fayed had written to the Crown Prince of Sharjah, Sheikh Al Qasimi, falsely claiming that the former manager had embezzled millions of dollars from Harrods.
Employees and managers were electronically bugged by Fayed. There was surveillance equipment everywhere: in the elevators and the bathrooms. There were hidden cameras on desks. As to our reporting about Fayed’s racism, we had eyewitness accounts of his daily walks around Harrods, where he would loudly proclaim his pathological hatred of Black and Asian employees when any came into view. At times he tried to get them fired on some pretext, such as contravening the dress code. One manager described “an almost constant stream of invective hurled towards Black and Asian people, primarily towards the cleaning staff.” As employees, they were never given jobs on the shop floors, only on the floor below for menial work, all in contravention of British antidiscrimination laws. Fayed’s manager, in his statement to us, described Fayed during one foray around the store walking over to a Black cleaner and telling her she was “fucking too fat.” He asked the manager, loudly, “What’s a fucking Black woman who is too fat to clean doing here?” He told the manager to get rid of her.
There were dozens of unfair dismissal cases pending. Many were settled, with cash, only after weeks and months of distress and intimidation toward the employees. There was a case where a female employee had been pressured to take a drug rap for Fayed’s brother Salah. When her testimony didn’t stand up and Salah came under suspicion, one of the former managers told us how he was introduced to a former employee of the Metropolitan Police who acted as a “consultant” to Fayed. Shortly afterward, all charges against Fayed’s brother were dropped. We got help from Roland “Tiny” Rowland, chairman of the mining company Lonrho, who had been passed over by the government in his bid for Harrods in favor of Fayed and had ever since been using his newspaper, The Observer, and intelligence-gathering companies to discredit his former opponent.
Then came the dirty tricks. Fayed saw the evidence further mounting against him and unleashed his security personnel, the ones he regularly called “fucking donkeys” to their faces. He had them intimidate witnesses who had spoken to us. On Fayed’s instructions, they subjected witnesses to anonymous phone calls. “You’ve been a very naughty girl” was a typical warning. Two witnesses had to be hidden away by Henry and David Hooper, one at a health farm, before protection orders could be issued. Henry, who is a successful writer of thrillers, had his own contacts in the spook world, and through them discovered that he was being followed. He, too, received threatening calls. “You’re up against some very serious people,” he was warned at one point.
They tried to set Henry up with false evidence. A bodyguard who claimed he’d been fired by Fayed came to see Henry and offered to sell him a videotape he supposedly had, purporting to show Fayed having sex in his office with a member of staff. Henry suspected the bodyguard was recording them, and said loudly, “But that would be stolen property. I’m not going to receive stolen goods.” Henry, too, had recorded the conversation. He also warned our lawyers, one of whom, incomprehensibly, went ahead and made an offer for the tape. Furious, Henry called a meeting with Condé Nast’s managers in London. But it was too late. Fayed had leaked the story to the Mail on Sunday, which reported that “at a clandestine meeting,” Henry (no mention of our English lawyer) had offered £5,000 for the stolen tapes. When the Mail’s lawyers heard the concealed tape of the conversation between Henry and the bodyguard, they realized that the paper itself was exposed to a libel action from Henry and quickly printed a retraction.
At one point during discovery, I had to go to London and then on to Paris. Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Condé Nast in England, gave a lunch for the Princess of Wales, and given my relationship with her—we cohosted the Serpentine dinners each year—he invited me and seated me on her left side. I must have caught an infection of some sort, because during the trip a boil had developed on the right side of my neck along the line of my shirt collar. And it was so raw and painful that in order not to chafe it with the collar, I had to move my whole torso in the direction of the princess to speak to her. Which she must have found incredibly odd.
I went on to Paris, for reasons that now escape me, and Sara Marks had flown over as well. She came up to my room at the Ritz one morning with a hi-tech-looking gadget. She reminded me that Fayed owned the hotel and that there was a good chance he was bugging my room. I make no excuses for my stupidity in not factoring the libel case into my choice of hotel. The gadget was something she’d bought at a “spy” shop on Madison Avenue—a machine used to detect the presence of bugging activity. We began going around the living room of the suite listening to the Geiger-counter-like monitor. It buzzed a bit near the phone and near the television set. We moved into the bedroom. The machine was largely silent as we made our way around the room. Until it came to the wall-sized tapestry over the bed. Then it just went berserk. I spent the next day and a half getting dressed and undressed in the dark and not talking to anyone on the phone.
Back home, the bills were mounting, and Si would get a bit teetery from time to time. As it continued, I’d remind him that Rupert Murdoch would fight these things on an almost daily basis. I wasn’t actually sure about that, but I knew that Si revered Murdoch—the great buccaneer of Si’s generation of media moguls—and it would get Si back on the train. When Fayed tried to set up Henry, Si just said, “Go for him. You can have whatever you need.”
A few weeks before we were due in court, Henry found a piece of evidence that we knew would terrify Fayed and his legal team. An acquaintance had told Henry that he’d seen a 150-word letter written by a friend of his—a senior government official—to Fayed, warning him that accusations against him by the official’s stepdaughter were shocking and totally believable, and that any further contact with her would have very serious consequences. Both Henry and I met with the stepdaughter, a young woman in her late twenties. She was about to get married and therefore didn’t want to sign an affidavit that could publicly connect her name to Fayed’s. She told us that she had been hired to do some work on his 208-foot yacht, the Jonikal. After she came aboard, he jumped her in her stateroom. When she rebuffed his advances, Fayed locked her in the room, turned off the water and air conditioning, and kept her there for three days. In other words, kidnapping and imprisonment. The young woman added that one of his requests to her before he locked her up was for her to relieve herself in his presence on a glass coffee table. She was obviously traumatized by the experience, but her father hadn’t wanted her name to be associated with Fayed—in the same way that there are no doubt more women who could have come out against Harvey Weinstein but didn’t want their names mentioned in the same sentence as his. We knew the letter was in Fayed’s possession. And so we asked for it in discovery, a bombshell request for Fayed’s lawyers to receive. Our lawyer’s letter referred to the “assault” on the official’s stepdaughter, and included the line: “It relates precisely to the conduct complained of in this case albeit in a rather more serious form than usual.” He did not know that we did not have the stepdaughter as a witness.
About a week before we were due to walk into court, Fayed announced that he wanted to settle. He said that he would drop the suit and that he would restore advertising to the Condé Nast magazines, advertising that he had pulled after Maureen’s story had run. But he demanded that we destroy all the evidence that we unearthed during discovery. I mentioned this to Si during one of our lunches. We were certainly relieved that he was dropping the suit. Si didn’t seem to care about Fayed’s willingness to restore the advertising to his European publications. But we both decided—in consultation with Henry and our lawyers—that destroying the evidence was out of the question. I wanted it available for future journalists and news outfits who found themselves in the grip of one of Fayed’s blizzards of libel actions. We made an extra copy of everything and put it in storage just in case. Fayed officially withdrew the lawsuit.
Henry pleaded forcefully for us not to settle, to pursue Fayed through the courts, on the grounds that, like Robert Maxwell before him, he could otherwise continue to stifle the press with payoffs and gag orders by exploiting the British libel laws. Fayed’s principal concern was that the evidence of his bullying and harassment not reach court. Indeed, according to our lawyer, Fayed was so worried that the settlement discussions might be recorded that he demanded they be held in the steam room of a London club, “with no possibility of a wire on the negotiators’ unclothed torsos.” Henry wanted to prepare a follow-up report that would vindicate Maureen’s original story, with the mass of new evidence. It would also be about how Vanity Fair took on the man who was responsible for so much corruption and litigation in Britain. And it would unfurl all that we had uncovered during our discovery, including many additional details of Fayed’s way of conducting business. These included Fayed ordering his security personnel to plot a break-in on a government minister’s home, and members of his staff routinely bribing police officers so that they would cooperate in the arrest and intimidation of Harrods employees falsely accused of theft. These, we felt, were matters of public interest by any standard.
