Max Clifford defended Mohamed Al Fayed because the billionaire “paid £250,000 to local children’s hospice” and suggested Al Fayed’s alleged 17-year-old victims were “quite willing”
Extraordinary footage captures convicted paedophile Max Clifford boast he covered up for “randy old sod” Mohamed Al Fayed because he “paid £250,000 to local children’s hospice”.
The disgraced PR guru, who in 2014 was convicted of eight counts of indecent assaults, was secretly recorded in footage aired last night in a new BBC documentary called Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods.
In the clip, Clifford is heard describing the billionaire, who, following his death last year, has been accused of rape by five women, as a man “who’s 76, but going on 18 when it comes to the ladies”, adding that he is a “randy old sod”.
“One of the many things he does is £250,000 a year to the CHASE hospice that I am a patron of. It all works extremely well,” Clifford continues in the video, filmed in 2008 when the PR professional spoke to journalist Chris Atkins as part of a documentary named Starsuckers. It aired at the time and the clip was repackaged for the BBC documentary this week, commissioned off the back of the allegations against Al Fayed, who was 94 when he died in London last August.
When Clifford, who died in 2017, is asked whether that could be interpreted as Al Fayed paying off his victims, he said: “Well you know in that situation, if he is groping 17 year olds that are quite willing because they are being paid a lot of money – fine.”
Mr Atkins approached Clifford for a normal sit-down interview at his mansion in Surrey to talk about how he and other PR gurus covered up damaging stories about their clients.
However, once their formal interview was over, Mr Atkins kept filming Clifford using a secret camera inside his shirt button. It was during this exchange when Clifford made the extraordinary comments about father-of-five Al Fayed.
Clifford also implied that some of the girls Al Fayed allegedly groped had gone “looking for it”. Clifford told the reporter: “There’s an awful lot of young ladies that are extremely happy to pamper rich, randy old [men].” He then described how two girls of this age “knew full well when he offered them a job as a buyer, that that was what was involved. To me – no problems”.
Mr Atkins said he was unable to release the clip until now because “Britain’s arcane libel laws prevented us publishing the full unedited tape at the time”. Mail Online, though, reports Mr Atkins spent several years pursuing the right, a quest made easier when Clifford himself was arrested for historic allegations of sexual assault against women and girls as young as 15.
Officers conducting Operation Yewtree, an investigation into the sex abuse allegations against Jimmy Savile and others, took the clips as evidence to be used in a criminal case against Clifford. Clifford later died in jail, three years after he was sentenced. (Mirror)