Keaton Stone speaks while picking up the Investigation of the Year prize at the British Journalism Awards 2025 for Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods. He’s between executive producer Mike Radford and awards host Jeremy Vine. Picture: Press Gazette/Adam Duke Photography
Keaton Stone became an “accidental investigative journalist” with his pursuit, now in its eighth year, of sexual assault accusations against Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed.
Stone spent years doggedly pursuing the story on his own after his then-fiancée Sophia, formerly a personal assistant for Al Fayed, told him she was a survivor.
He then took it to the BBC where it took some time to get green lit but was eventually turned into the BBC2 documentary Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods .
Stone, executive producer Mike Radford, producer Cassie Cornish-Trestrail and director Erica Gornall won the Investigation of the Year prize at the British Journalism Awards last week.
Stone said on stage that he “went down the rabbit hole” after helping his wife with her CV. He had moved Harrods to the top, seeing it as a prestigious employer, and she became upset and explained what had happened.
Stone added of the BBC team: “Somehow they made this incredible production and myself and all the survivors were so grateful, so thankful, and the world now knows the truth, history has been rewritten and it’s fantastic, but there’s still a lot more to do, still a lot more that hasn’t come out.”
More than 150 victims of Al Fayed have entered a compensation scheme opened by Harrods while more than 300 victims have entered settlement schemes through independent law firms . Some 146 people have reported a crime to the Met Police as part of their investigation.
Speaking to Press Gazette after the awards ceremony, Stone said: “I’m an accidental investigative journalist. I wasn’t trained in this. I don’t know it. I normally make nice, shiny space documentaries with Brian Cox or The One Show or whatever. This is not my thing.
“But when my wife, my fiancée at the time, told me about her experience, I knew that this needed to be looked into. It was horrendous. She told me through tears and I needed to explore what it was.”
Stone is ordinarily a TV producer specialising in specialist-factual science series and documentary programmes like A Very British Space Launch for Channel 4 and science series Rendezvous With The Future for BBC Studios.
Stone said he “had to learn the job on the way… I suddenly had a fast track course in learning the art, I guess, of investigative journalism.”
He added: “It was very hard because I didn’t know what I was doing, essentially. But I guess part of me not knowing what I was doing and speaking to these incredible women, they trusted me for a person rather than a proper journalist contacting them, and I was the husband of a survivor.”
He noted that some of the first women he spoke to remembered Sophia, and told him their story because they wanted to support her.
“And then, of course, that opened up to others feeling reassured, and they spoke with me. And it was kind of a snowball effect that lots and lots of amazing survivors entrusted me… Some of them have not even told their partners, their family, friends, and yet they entrusted that to me, and I felt a deep duty, responsibility, that they did, that this needs to be heard and known about.”
When he felt he was ready, Stone started trying to get interest at the BBC but said it “wasn’t the quickest process”.
“Of course, loads of things have happened with Fayed before, loads of people tried to come out with it and it never landed. Other massive organisations tried to. This time it had to land.
“And we were facing the other sensitivity that while the BBC had it, he died, and, sadly, there’s a lot of bad people out there still alive to focus their investigations on. So I then had the responsibility, knowing what I knew, to make this so overwhelming, so damning, so enormous in its scope and scale and evidence, that the BBC could not say no, and thankfully they didn’t.”
Mike Radford, Erica Gornall, Cassie Cornish-Trestrail and Keaton Stone pick up the Investigation of the Year prize at the British Journalism Awards 2025. Picture: Press Gazette/Adam Duke Photography
Stone added that he wished Al Fayed was still alive when they published. The businessman died aged 94 in August 2023, 13 months before the BBC documentary ultimately aired.
Stone described seeing the breaking news alert announcing Al Fayed’s death as “a sucker punch to the chest. Everything I worked for, everything I’d hoped, everything I’d spoken to survivors, was that we wanted [it to come out] while he was alive. We didn’t want another [Jimmy] Savile situation…
“But things happen, things take time to go through, et cetera and sadly, he did die. But I’m comforted in the fact that, if we can count on it as any condolence, he knew it was coming,” referring to a “bombardment” of legal letters.
- The British Journalism Awards judges said
- “This was an explosive, highly revelatory investigation in which an impressive range of sources were persuaded to go on the record. It had a wide-ranging impact on a major British institution and wider society.”
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