Visits: 2
Among the purse-lipped patricians of Buckingham Palace, Sir Philip Green stood out a mile.
With his gravelly London accent, his perma-tan and his rattail of white curls, he reveled in his role as the King of Retail Fashion, cursing a blue streak and flying in batches of supermodels for his birthday. His rages were mythic. Once, during a failed bid to buy Marks & Spencer, he was widely reported by the British press to have confronted the retail chain’s chairman outside his office, grabbed him by the lapels and yelled, “Oi! I want a word with you!”
Mr. Green’s ascent of Britain’s social ladder, made complete when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, was tainted this week after he became the latest high-profile target of sexual harassment claims.
Mr. Green, 66, had used nondisclosure agreements to hush five former employees who accused him of sexual harassment and racist abuse. He then managed to secure an injunction, which remains in effect, to block publication of a monthslong investigation of those charges by a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, at the estimated cost of $642,000 in legal fees.
But a plummy-voiced Labour peer, Baron Peter Hain, decided to defy the court order, invoking his parliamentary privilege to identify Mr. Green as the subject of the newspaper’s investigation. The revelation comes at an important moment in Britain, after the Harvey Weinstein case unleashed decades of sexual harassment accusations, and as Prime Minister Theresa May considers banning the legal practice of issuing nondisclosure agreements in such cases.
Mr. Green “would be slightly baffled by the way the machinery isn’t working the way it used to,” said Oliver Shah, the author of “Damaged Goods,” a biography of Mr. Green.
“He comes from a day when you could control the press in the U.K.,” said Mr. Shah, who is also the business editor of The Sunday Times. “The law to him is no different than a baseball bat that he wields. He always said, ‘We’re going to set the dogs on you,’ meaning Schillings,” his law firm. “He would pump huge amounts of money into them. He loves the idea of injunctions.”
Mr. Green, the chairman of the Arcadia Group, has denied breaking the law.
“To the extent that it is suggested that I have been guilty of unlawful sexual or racist behavior, I categorically and wholly deny these allegations,” he said in a statement released after Mr. Hain revealed his name.
Requests for comment from the Arcadia Group and Schillings, Mr. Green’s law firm, were not answered.
Among the most important details to emerge from the Weinstein scandal is the routine use of nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, to effectively cover up sexual abuse allegations.
Last year, Mr. Weinstein’s former assistant in Britain, Zelda Perkins, decided to break an NDA she had signed in 1998 in which she agreed not to speak about episodes of sexual harassment and assault. In the months that followed, she has campaigned to change the law.
“How can you say that an agreement is reached consensually when the power disparity is so off the scale?” she said. “ At 23, I couldn’t go to a big lawyer. I didn’t know who a big lawyer was. I didn’t know anything.”
British lawmakers have begun an inquiry into the practice, and Mrs. May has said she will look into it as well.
Still, England has strong privacy laws that have long allowed public figures to block negative reporting in the press. The Telegraph is legally prevented from publishing any further details on the allegations, pending a legal judgment on whether the people involved can legally break their confidentiality agreements.
And, in recent days, some jurists have come forward to say that people should wait for a court decision.
“The women in question were not contractually prohibited from reporting crime to the police,” said Lord Edward Garnier, a former solicitor general and a lawyer specializing in privacy and media law cases. “I just think there’s a lot of shouting going on at the moment, dressed up as freedom of the press and it’s all to do with personal agendas, attention seeking, personal dislike of ugly, fat businessmen.”
British journalists, however, have largely cheered Mr. Hain’s decision to challenge the court, said Stig Abell, the author of “How Britain Really Works,” who has served as a press regulator and managing editor of The Sun.
“It’s the nature of injunctions: They very often come from powerful men and they silence less powerful women,” Mr. Abell said. “People who are interested in that power dynamic would probably say it’s a good thing that it has been challenged so quickly.”
The British press has been flooded with journalists’ reminiscences about Mr. Green, who was for many years confident that he could control what was written about him.
He bemoaned the post-Weinstein #MeToo movement, after The Financial Times published a report condemning a men-only charity event he had attended.
“When is all this going to end?” he asked. “There’s no stag parties, no hen parties, no more girls parading in the ring at the boxing — so they’re all banned?”
The report found that young women working at the event were groped, harassed and propositioned.
Mr. Green, raised by middle-class business owners from Croydon, quit school as a teenager to try his hand at business, and rose through the “rag trade” by reselling excess stock from bankrupt companies. He became one of Britain’s best-known retailers two decades ago, when he bought the department store group BHS, a fixture on British shopping streets since 1928, and Arcadia, which owns Topshop.
He was famously voluble with employees. “You would see young women, particularly, reduced to tears,” Brian Hill, at one time BHS’s head of men’s wear, told Mr. Shah. “Philip would often have a meeting before he flew off in his jet to Monaco and he would pick on one person and just batter them. The horrible thing about it was sometimes you would sit there and think, ‘Thank God it’s not me.’”
Riding high on Topshop’s success, he became known for over-the-top parties: For his 50th birthday, guests were told to report to Luton airport with a piece of flesh colored underwear — to be worn with a toga. At his 55th, held in the Maldives, so many private jets arrived that latecomers were told there was no room to park.
His reputation began to corrode in 2016, when BHS went into bankruptcy shortly after he sold it for £1 to Dominic Chappell. The collapse put tens of thousands of jobs and pensions at risk. A parliamentary investigation branded this episode the “unacceptable face of capitalism” and was harsh in its criticism of Mr. Green.
“We found little evidence to support the reputation for retail business acumen for which he received his knighthood,” it said in its conclusion. Many lawmakers voted for his knighthood, bestowed in 2006, to be rescinded, a rare procedure, but the threat was shelved when Mr. Green agreed to pay $466 million into the BHS pension plan. With the threat renewed in the last few days, few of his A-list friends have come forward in his defense.
“This guy has gone from nowhere, to the very top, toward the bottom, very quickly,” said Stuart Lansley, an author of “Top Man: How Philip Green Built His High Street Empire.”
“He won’t be enjoying any of this, for sure,” Mr. Lansley said. “He doesn’t like negative publicity.”