by Megan Clement, editor of the Impact newsletter

This story contains details of sexual assaults.

Between 1998 and 2000, Kristina Svensson worked at one of the world’s most storied and glamorous hotels as an executive assistant to one of the world’s most powerful men. She says that every time she saw him, he sexually assaulted her. 

The hotel was the Ritz Paris, and her boss was its owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed.

During meetings, Al-Fayed would grab her breasts, stick his tongue in her mouth and trap her in armchairs while pressing her face into his crotch. To extricate herself, Svensson would slide to the floor and crawl away on her hands and knees. As she escaped, Al-Fayed would put his hands up her skirt. In meetings, she tried to defend herself, hiding behind notepads or furniture, but, she says, “he’d find a different part of my body to attack”.

“He would always laugh afterwards,” Svensson says, “He would cackle… And I kept thinking: if I ignore it, he’ll just stop, he’ll realise that I’m a professional. If I say anything or do anything, I’m going to get fired and I have to pay rent. How am I going to pay rent if I get fired?”

After two years, the repeated assaults had taken their toll. She would vomit multiple times a day, she says, and was put on a range of psychiatric medications as she tried to cope with her situation. She says she stuck it out for as long as she did because she wanted to leave with a reference letter after two years of solid employment. 

Svensson says she reported the abuse to HR in January 2000. Nothing was done, so in April she tried to negotiate a departure, telling management that it was “difficult” to work for Al-Fayed. She was fired. 

Svensson said she provided information about the assaults to police as part of a separate investigation soon after she left the Ritz, but there was no follow-up to that interview. In 2003, she shared her story with the lawyer of another employee who was seeking damages after her own traumatic experiences at the hotel, in support of that employee’s case. The statement, which I have seen, attests both to the nature of Al-Fayed’s abuse and Svensson’s fear of retribution if she spoke out.  

It was only in 2023, when she was approached by a documentary producer about her time at the Ritz, that Svensson’s account sparked any kind of action. Svensson was one of 20 women who appeared in the BBC documentary Predator at Harrods, in which survivors testified about Al-Fayed’s serial abuse of the women who worked for him. Much of that abuse took place at Al-Fayed’s properties in France.

Kristina Svensson says Mohamed Al-Fayed repeatedly assaulted her while she was working at the Ritz.
Photo courtesy of Kristina Svensson.

“When the BBC wanted to hear my story, and they said they were going to do this documentary, I was so excited and relieved,” Svensson says now. “The first thing I said was, ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve been waiting 23 years for you.’”

But 23 years was too late. Since the documentary aired, dozens of survivors of Al-Fayed’s abuse have joined together to bring a legal case against the new owners of Harrods in the UK. Svensson, however, is the only survivor interviewed for the documentary who was not employed by Harrods in London but by the Ritz in Paris.

While there is no statute of limitations in England and Wales for sexual assaults of any kind, France currently bars criminal cases from proceeding six years after the alleged facts in cases of sexual assault and 20 years in cases of rape for adult victims. When Svensson was working at the Ritz, the statute was three years for sexual assault and 10 years for rape.

Svensson would like to bring a case against her former employer, but the legal advice she has received so far indicates that she would struggle to do so under current laws. She says that’s not fair. “I reported within the statute of limitations, and I was brushed off.” 

A representative of The Ritz Paris declined a request for comment for this story. A spokesperson for the hotel told the New York Times earlier this year that it was conducting an investigation led by outside counsel.

“One more brick in the wall”

The statute of limitations exists to prevent miscarriages of justice and applies to all criminal offences in France with the exception of crimes against humanity. 

“The longer we wait to judge after the offence, the greater the risk of losing evidence,” Audrey Darsonville, an associate professor in criminal law at the University of Nanterre, says. “The very pragmatic logic is that the criminal justice system cannot work properly when it is brought in a very long time after the offence has been committed.”

But many victims of past abuse say they were not believed when they spoke out in the pre-#MeToo era, and now that public understanding of sexual violence is more advanced, it’s too late for them to get justice. In the case of Al-Fayed, it was only after he died in August 2023 that media interest in survivors’ testimonies grew. During his life, he aggressively sued those who tried to report on his history of abuse.

The French parliament is currently considering a draft law that would institute a “sliding statute” for adult victims of sexual abuse. This would mean that people whose cases are time-barred could get an extension and still press charges if their abuser is found to have victimised someone else more recently, within the statute of limitations. The sliding statute was introduced for child victims in 2021.

This would be just the latest tweak to the system to account for the particular difficulties of bringing a prosecution for sexual violence: the statute of limitations has been repeatedly extended over the years, and in cases of crimes against minors, it now only kicks in once a victim turns 18, giving them until the age of 48 to come forward. Darsonville emphasises that these changes have already helped many: “Today’s victims are not in the same situation as victims from 20 years ago,” she says.

For some, these changes are not enough. The NGO Equality Now, which advocates for gender equality through law change worldwide, supports lifting all statutes of limitations on crimes of sexual assault and rape. 

Jacqui Hunt, the global lead on ending sexual violence at Equality Now, says justice systems are already stacked against women who experience sexual assault. Time-barring cases “doesn’t recognise the reality of inequality of women in the justice system and the prejudice that they come across: the fact that they’re not believed, the fact they’re stigmatised, the fact that they’re told they have to behave a certain way,” she says. 

“It’s just one more brick in the wall against her ever being able to access justice.”

The case of famed television presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women, has been a turning point in public understanding of time-barred crimes in France. Many of the claims against the former newsreader were dropped because they fell outside the statute of limitations. Poivre d’Arvor denies the allegations against him.

Recent revelations about the rape and sexual abuse of children at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school in the Pyrenees between 1950 and 2010 are also reigniting the debate. Of the more than 150 complaints brought by alleged victims so far, at least 68 relate to sexual assault. The vast majority of these cases fall outside the statute of limitations, and so will need to be considered alongside more recent offences using the sliding statute for child victims.  

In New York, the passing of the Adult Survivors Act provided a one-year window within which people whose cases of sexual assault fell outside the statute of limitations could bring civil cases against alleged perpetrators. It was this brief exception to the rules that allowed the R&B singer Cassie to sue Sean Combs, previously known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, for rape and physical abuse in 2023. Combs settled the case the following day, but Cassie’s allegations kicked off a wave of criminal indictments. Today he awaits charges of sexual assault and sex trafficking. He denies all accusations.  

“It just seems so wrong”

In rare circumstances, it is possible to gain an exception from the statute of limitations in France if a victim can prove they have previously faced insurmountable obstacles in coming forward. This is the last hope of Lisa Brinkworth, a journalist who says Gérald Marie, a French executive at Elite Model Management, assaulted her in 1998 while she was working undercover for the BBC on a story about sexual abuse in the modelling industry. 

In front of laughing and jeering witnesses from the modelling world, Brinkworth says Marie got on top of her, pinned her to a chair and repeatedly pushed his erection into her stomach at a restaurant in Milan. 

“I thought I was going to be raped,” she says. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

After the #MeToo movement broke through in 2017, Brinkworth began contacting other alleged victims, some of whom were under 18 when they say Marie raped them. 

Marie’s lawyer, Céline Bekerman, provided the following statement regarding the case: “Mr Gérald Marie categorically denies the accusations made against him. We can only regret that forty years [sic] after the alleged events, despite there being no material evidence to corroborate these accusations, Mr Marie is forced to defend himself against an account that seems more like a media stunt than a genuine quest for justice.”

The cases against Marie were closed by French prosecutors in 2023 due to the statute of limitations, but Brinkworth was able to appeal the decision in her case, claiming there were insurmountable obstacles to her doing so earlier. 

Brinkworth says the BBC has suppressed video evidence proving the facts of her assault. The documentary was pulled from public view as part of a confidential settlement the broadcaster made with Elite Model Management after it first aired. She says her managers directed her not to go to the police. In the aftermath, she says she was followed, received threats and had to live in safe houses for a time. Her lawyers say these three factors made it impossible for her to bring her case within the statute of limitations. 

“That settlement has silenced me, and it enabled Gérald Marie to continue working with young girls and putting them at risk,” Brinkworth says. 

A BBC spokesperson said: “As we’ve always made clear, we take these matters very seriously and we know the situation is distressing for Lisa Brinkworth. We have already provided material to the French authorities to help Ms Brinkworth pursue the matter and investigators have assured us they have what they currently need from the BBC. We have also provided material to Ms Brinkworth directly. We will continue to do whatever we can to assist with the process.”

A proposition to establish a sliding statute of limitations for victims of serial abusers is being examined by French parliament.
Photo: Richard Ying et Tangui Morlier. CC BY-SA 3.0

Brinkworth’s first appeal was rejected, and her case will now go before France’s court of cassation. She says she is persisting despite the considerable cost and despite the small odds that she will succeed, so she can give voice to the other alleged victims. 

“The reason I’m doing this is that I’m allowed to call them all as witnesses so their stories can be heard,” she says. “I really want to see justice for those women who were young and vulnerable at the time. They were so traumatised.”

A British national, she says she was shocked when she first heard their cases might be time-barred in France.

“It just seems so wrong. Because we know that it can take decades for victims of rape and sexual assault to come forward out of fear and shame.”

“Predators don’t stop”

Audrey Darsonville doubts that the statute of limitations will be fully lifted for sexual violence in France. “The idea has always been to create a hierarchy by saying the most serious offences in the penal code are crimes against humanity. And therefore, no other offence should be exempt from the statute of limitations,” she says.

But the proposed changes could still make a difference for survivors. The draft law establishing a sliding statute has passed the lower house of French parliament and is now being examined by the senate. If both houses agree on a final text, it will become law. If it does, Svensson plans to find other, more recent victims of sexual abuse at the Ritz, and join them thanks to the sliding statute. 

“The passing of this law would be a game changer,” she says. 

Svensson says that in the aftermath of the Avignon mass rape case, she owes it to herself and other victims to keep pushing to continue France’s national reckoning on sexual violence. 

“I lived for these decades in terror, fear, shame, depression, anxiety,” she says. But, “as Gisèle Pelicot said, it’s not for me to be ashamed. It’s for them to be ashamed.”

And though the perpetrator in her case is dead, she says a sliding statute would allow victims of other serial offenders in France to find each other, form a case and stop the abuse. 

“Victims who are from the past should be empowered to find more recent victims, because predators don’t stop,” Svensson says.

As for her case: “If we can’t have justice in court, we’ll have justice in the court of the public.”

– Megan Clement is the editor of the Impact newsletter.

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