Former Fulham Ladies captain Ronnie Gibbons has told the Athletic that the club’s chairman Mohamed Al-Fayed sexually abused her twice after shutting her in a room at Harrods.
Gibbons tells David Ornstein and Laura Williamson that the former Fulham chairman forcibly kissed her, stroked her knee, groped her and that she had to bang on the door to get out.
Gibbons, then aged 20 and the skipper of England’s first fully professional female side, said:
“I was used. 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.”
