Gulf minister of tolerance in ‘sex assault’ on Hay books festival worker
Caitlin McNamara, the organiser of Hay Abu Dhabi, has waived anonymity to tell of her alleged ordeal at the hands of Sheikh Nahyan, the UAE’s minister of tolerance
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Caitlin McNamara was working for the Hay festival in Abu Dhabi when she was attacked JACK HILL |
ABritish woman who alleges she was the victim of a serious sexual assault by a senior Emirati royal while working on the launch of the Hay literary festival in Abu Dhabi has been interviewed by Scotland Yard.
Caitlin McNamara, 32, claims she was attacked by Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, 69, the minister of tolerance in the United Arab Emirates cabinet and a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family.
The alleged assault took place on Valentine’s Day this year at a remote private island villa where McNamara thought she had been summoned to discuss preparations for the inaugural Hay Festival Abu Dhabi.
The sheikh denies any wrongdoing and said this weekend that he was “surprised and saddened” by the claims.
Last night Hay’s directors pledged never to return to the Gulf kingdom again while Sheikh Nahyan remains in post. Caroline Michel, chair of the Hay board, described the alleged assault “as an appalling violation and a hideous abuse of trust and position”.
McNamara has chosen to waive her anonymity to tell her story.
It started with a phone call
When her telephone rang on Valentine’s Day and Sheikh Nahyan came on the line, McNamara’s heart sank.
She had spent almost six months working at his tolerance ministry, having been hired by the Hay festival to organise its first collaboration with the UAE.
Writers from all over the world were flying into Abu Dhabi for the festival that was starting in just 11 days, including the Booker prize-winning Bernardine Evaristo, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and Jung Chang, the author of Chinese blockbuster Wild Swans. McNamara had even persuaded the ministry to agree an opening night performance by Mashrou’ Leila, a Lebanese rock group whose lead singer is openly gay.
But there was one problem. While Hay Festival promotes freedom of expression, human rights organisations repeatedly slam the Gulf state’s persecution of critics.
Human rights was an issue close to McNamara’s heart. “There’s that age-old debate of whether it’s better to have a platform in countries like that or make a stand by boycotting,” she said. “I’d done my postgrad degree at Soas [the School of Oriental and African Studies) in Arabic after international relations in Sussex, specialising in cultural diplomacy, and I really believed in engaging.”
As the only foreign woman working out of the ministry and an Arabic speaker, McNamara had tried to use her access to those in power, to seek change.
The day before Nahyan’s call she had met with senior officials at the ministry with Peter Florence, head of the Hay Festival, on speakerphone. They raised the case of Ahmed Mansoor, a well-known poet, sentenced to 10 years for social media posts “insulting the status and prestige of the UAE”. It was an intervention that discomforted Hay’s own PR company, Brunswick Arts.
Call from the sheikh
Late the next morning , came the call from Nahyan. “He asked how I was and asked me to dinner,” she said. “It was a very brief formal conversation. I had never spoken to him on the phone or met him alone and assumed it would be a meeting with some prominent Emiratis to try and get festival to drop their campaign.”
“After six months there I was used to being summoned to meetings at all times of day,” she added. “And no one said no to Nahyan — he was like a god.”
Nahyan, 69, is a member of the enormously wealthy royal family of Abu Dhabi, the House of Al Nahyan, headed by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The fourth-richest royal family in the world, according to Business Insider, it controls a sovereign wealth fund with estimated assets of $830bn (£640bn), including many properties in London, and one of whom, Sheikh Mansour, owns Manchester City. McNamara is from Hay, the daughter of a builder and a GP, rents a one-bedroom flat in east London and cycles everywhere.
She dressed as for a work dinner in a conservative Muslim society in a long-sleeved ankle-length white dress with a high neck.
Her phone records show that Nahyan’s driver called her about 8pm to say he had arrived at her hotel, the five-star Bab Al Qasr, where the ministry had put her up.
“Feels like I’ve been called to the headmaster’s office for disrupting class,” she texted Florence from the car at 8.11pm. “If not back in 24 hours pls send help.”
“Text me the moment you’re out,” he replied. “And don’t eat anything blue. Ever.”
Despite the joky tone, McNamara admits she felt uncomfortable and she switched on her WhatsApp tracker, which enables others to follow your location. “I wasn’t concerned but I did think it’s dark and I’d been told I’d gone too far,” she said.
She had met Nahyan, she thinks, on five or six occasions to discuss festival preparations — but always with others. Often referred to as the “sheikh of hearts”, he is widely liked within the UAE.
But her disquiet grew when, instead of heading to the palace, they drove in the opposite direction and started going out of town. The driver wouldn’t say where we were going,” she said.
Eventually, after about 16 minutes, they crossed a bridge to a small island with a villa,which she believes to be on the exclusive Al Gurm resort, where the properties are mostly owned by royals. One is currently on sale for more than £7m.
“It looked like the Guggenheim — circular and all concrete and glass,” she said. The driver stayed in the car and a doorman opened the door and took her into a lounge.
There was no one there, but the walls were covered with pictures of the sheikh with royals from around the world, as well as the Rolling Stones and the Pope.
The doorman took her handbag, which contained her phone, as was normal with meetings with senior royals, and offered her a drink. She asked for water, the UAE being a strict Muslim country where alcohol is prohibited, and thinking it was a work meeting. Instead, she said, he brought a bottle of white wine.
McNamara waited for about 15 minutes before the sheikh came in. He was, she said, immediately more friendly than she expected. “To my shock, he hugged me,” she said.
He also opened a cupboard and pulled out a Tag Heuer bag containing a watch worth about £3,500. “It was all gold and diamonds — something I’d never wear,” she said. “But I was used to these displays of extravagance, so didn’t think anything of it.” In the corner of the room was an enormous bunch of red roses. Nahyan opened the white wine and poured her a glass.
“He was drinking red wine,” she said. “I’d faced real opposition in his ministry to get the festival a licence so the authors could have a glass of wine. For three months they’d been telling me, ‘You can’t do that if Sheikh Nahyan is there’, so to have him guzzling red wine was infuriating.
“He gestured for me to sit by him on the sofa and turned on the TV and began talking about Donald Trump,” she said. “He told me to take my shoes off, which I didn’t.”
“I started talking about Mansoor [the poet], which I thought the meeting was about, and he seemed a bit irritated. He said Mansoor is Muslim Brotherhood and is not getting out of jail — that scared me as they don’t usually speak frankly.”
He spoke in English — like many Gulf royals, Nahyan is an Anglophile schooled in the UK, attending Millfield boarding school in Somerset then Magdalen College, Oxford — and is a frequent visitor to London.
Then, she said, he put on a DVD of him and his friends travelling round the world, in kilts in Scotland then in South America at a carnival with scantily-clad dancers.
“He talked about his life in London and house in Hampstead,” said McNamara. Then, she claimed, he said: “Since the first moment I saw you I wanted to be close with you and I’m going to fly you to Paris and we’ll stay at Le Bristol [a five-star hotel].”
“I said, ‘I’m here with the festival,’” she continued. “He said: ‘Don’t worry about that, you stay on after and I’m going to take you around.’”
He got ‘forceful’
“That’s when he started touching me,” she claimed. “It was creepy. He was on the sofa next to me and began touching my arm and feet and I was pulling away, then he got forceful ... Suddenly, it clicked why I was there. I felt so naive.”
She said she also felt fearful. “I was alone on this island in a concrete building with this powerful man in a country where every day you heard stories about people disappeared in the desert.”
McNamara said she did not know what to do. “Every woman in the world knows that feeling — I need to get out without offending. Having worked in the [Middle East] region for 10 years I know that these aren’t people you piss off. It wasn’t like being in London, where I’d just tell him to get lost.”
She was also thinking about the festival. “I’d hired all these people, and was flying writers and people over, and I knew I needed to get out of there without this man thinking I was rejecting him.”
To McNamara, Hay was more than just a job. “I grew up there and the festival was our town. Peter was a family friend and a mentor. I’d worked every job — washing up, marshal in the car park, running the Green Room at 15, taking writers to their venues and research for Peter.”
“Also I felt such an idiot, thinking I was there to talk about the campaign for the poet, when he clearly just saw me as a plaything.”
“I started saying, ‘You’re my boss’ — but he said that doesn’t matter,” she said. “Then I told him I’m engaged — but he said that doesn’t matter.” She said she told him she wanted to leave and alleges he then said: “You can’t go, I prepared dinner for you. He took me through to another room.”
“In that room it started getting really horrible,” she alleged. “He grabbed my face and started kissing me.”
The doorman appeared again, she said, with a bowl of lentil soup for the sheihk and a huge tray for her with about 15 plates.
“The sheikh said this was a tasting menu of all he thought I’d like — there was smoked salmon and avocado, shepherd’s pie, fish biryani, steak and chips, and desserts. I felt sick and told him I wasn’t hungry but he kept cutting things up and trying to feed me. I didn’t know what to do.”
She had, she said, also stopped drinking the white wine, fearing it might be spiked. “He kept saying, ‘I thought you were Irish, drink!’”
Finally, she said, he went to the bathroom. “Through the curtains there was a glass door, so I went outside and there was a lawn with a jetty and I went to the end to see if I could swim somehow but all I could see was the sea, and there were also checkpoints.”
When she went back inside, he was walking around the lounge looking for her. “I told him that it was late and I wanted to go home,” she said.
“He said OK. There seemed a change of tone and we went into the room where they had put my bag so I thought we were heading out.” While his back was turned, at 11.45pm, she managed to quickly text Florence. To his horror, her tracker location looked as if she were in the sea.
“Please God tell me your [sic] partying on a boat,” he replied. “Peter he kissed me,” she replied. “I don’t want to mess up your festival but I need to get out of here.”
Instead of letting her go, she claimed the sheikh took her on a tour. “We went into room after room. The villa was really disorientating. There was lots of art, a room full of swords, and another with a Jacuzzi, where he told me to get undressed and get in, but I said no.”
The golden lift
“Then we got in a gold lift where he pushed me against the wall and began rubbing my breasts in a weird way like windscreen wipers,” she claimed. “We got out in a room full of bottles of perfumes and he pushed me backwards onto a circular bed covered in fur. He pulled up his kandora and was naked under, and got on top of me. I pulled my dress down but he put his hands up my dress and his fingers inside of me, it was really hurting and dry-humping me.” Nahyan has denied these allegations.
“He was so frenzied,” she added. “ I kept trying to push him away — there was no way I could do this politely.
“I was scared. I know what they do to people like those princesses from Dubai who tried to escape who they abducted and keep prisoner.
“This man controlled every aspect of my life out there, my flights, my visa and I’d spent enough time there to know his power and influence.”
So fearful was she that she cannot explain how she got away. “I just remember he kept grinding and dry-humping my leg even as I was escaping,” she said.
Somehow she managed to get downstairs to the door and into the car. “I was trying not to cry,” she said. “I didn’t know what they would do to me — if they would take me back to the hotel.”
She texted Florence from the car at 12.30am telling him “managed to leave his house. Of course he didn’t want to talk about human rights. So stupid of me.”
During the journey the sheikh called twice, as her phone records show. “He said I love you,” she said.
As soon as she got back to the hotel, she called Florence and told him what had happened. While she was on the phone the doorbell went and 100 red roses and the Swiss watch that she had left behind were delivered.
“I was really angry and frightened,” she said. “Peter said, ‘You need to leave now,” but I didn’t want to go in the dark. I stayed up all night thinking, he kept calling me and I was ignoring the calls so I knew I needed to go.”
Escape to Dubai
She called her friend Josh in London, and another friend living in Dubai with her partner. That friend describes how distressed McNamara was, “almost incoherent”, and offered to put her up.
When it was light she got a taxi the two-hour journey to Dubai staying the night before checking into the nearby Zabeel House hotel under another name.
She also called her mother, a retired GP, to tell her what had happened and for medical advice.
Meanwhile, the sheikh kept calling. Her phone records show that the day after the incident he called her 14 times.
On Sunday, February 16, he sent her a text message. ‘Good morning my dearest darling I hope all is going as plan have a wonderful day don’t stress yourself looking forward to see you soon miss you take care LoL’.
That morning on the advice of Tom Fletcher, former British ambassador to Lebanon, who lived in Abu Dhabi, she called a senior consular official at the British embassy in Dubai. Not wanting to discuss the assault over the phone, he agreed to coffee at the hotel.
The Foreign Office report
A redacted Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) report obtained under a personal data request confirms they met there at 14.50.
According to McNamara: “He said they were not supposed to give advice, but his advice would be to leave and not report it to the police, as I’d end up arrested.”
The FCO report puts this differently.
“I advised that the embassy would never tell her what to do in terms of reporting the incident to police or on whether to stay in UAE or leave,” stated the report. “We had a long discussion about this and I acknowledged it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to raise a case with the police and name NN as her attacker. She would also face the same problem in getting any kind of legal representation.”
As the report confirmed, she went to the embassy the next morning, Monday, February 17, and saw the consular official again, as well as a female counsellor.
“McNamara said she was continuing to receive unwanted calls from NN,” it stated. She was still receiving calls from festival sponsors and artists — Soyinka called her that day.
“It was really frustrating,” she said. “I’d spent six months building this festival that was so hard and to have it all ruined because of the whims of this man in 2020 .”
Moreover, her two younger sisters were booked to fly out and join her for the festival and then have a holiday. “I couldn’t stop thinking about my little sister who had saved up to fly out for the festival — she’s a student. It was her first time in the Middle East and I didn’t want to reinforce all those clichés about Arab men that I’d fought so hard against all my career.”
Nahyan sent her another message on the Tuesday, telling her: “Do please call whenever it’s convenient for you, take care.”
Eventually, she left for Oman on February 23, two days before the festival, and paid to change her sisters’ flights to meet up with her there instead.
It was supposed to be a holiday but she could not stop thinking about what had happened. The UAE labour ministry kept calling and messaging her, telling her she had broken the country’s labour laws by leaving before her contract was up. They had “no choice but to report her as absconding”.
On February 25, the festival opened as planned. “I was watching the Harvey Weinstein verdict on television as I followed the launch on my laptop. I could see Peter and Nahyan on stage, being applauded for something I’d built. It made me feel such a fool — how is that still happening?
“I understood why Peter went ahead. I didn’t want all that hard work to be for nothing, to let everyone down. But nobody knew what had happened to me — they thought I’d had a breakdown. I wanted people [at the festival] to know.”
In desperation, she messaged Florence. “Hi Peter I know you have an insane amount on today but watching the Weinstein verdict on the news and with Nahyan playing the good guy at the launch I can’t hack staying quiet about what he did, it goes against everything I’m about but I also don’t want to mess up anything for you and the team.”
“I’m going to reference Weinstein in my speech,” he replied. According to a tweet from one of the festival’s board members, Guto Harri, Florence said: “If anybody has to be banged up, today of all days and from now on let it only be the Harvey Weinsteins of the world who disgrace humanity.”
‘I have no shame’
McNamara emailed him later that morning saying, “I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable with how this is being covered up.” She added a statement detailing event on the night of the alleged assault and asked him to send out to her colleagues and the board.
It concluded: “I did not expect or deserve this so I have no shame about sharing the details of what happened should anyone wish to know ... I would like the team to know so that we can work together to reduce the risk to others and for honesty’s sake, to ensure that we’re not being hypocritical in asking the Ministry to practice the values that they preach.’
The statement was never sent. Contacted by The Sunday Times to explain, Florence responded that he was too unwell to answer questions. Caroline Michel, the festival chair, replied; “It was not possible to communicate the incident to everyone, nor safe to do so while we lacked a clearer plan for seeking justice. So, for reasons of confidentiality, security and to buy McNamara important decision-making time, the specific details of the attack were shared carefully within a very tight circle.”
On March 2 she received a final message from Nahyan. ‘Good evening my dear McNamara,’ it reads. ‘I just want to convey my utmost appreciation for the outstanding hard work you did which made the Hay festival a success. I’m disappointed that I didn’t have chance to thank you in person however I want you to know you will always be welcomed back whenever you like it will be a pleasure to see you again.’
She flew back to London with her sisters on March 5 to find a nation preparing for pandemic. Her salary from the ministry had been stopped and her future contract to set up Hay Festival in Tel Aviv cancelled because of Covid.
“What he had done affected everything,” she said. “My personal relationships – I split up with my long-time boyfriend; my family; my friends ; my work – not only had I lost my job but also I couldn’t imagine ever working again in the Middle East. I can’t go back to the UAE but even the whole Arab world.”
The day before lockdown she took all her books about the Middle East to a charity shop.
“I also felt abandoned by the festival,” she said. “I spent lockdown in my flat in East London feeling as if I’d been swirled around and spat out.”
Eventually on April 21 she sent an email to Philippe Sands, the renowned writer and human rights barrister, who is on the board of the festival. It was the first he had heard of the attack and he was horrified.
They put her on the payroll so she could receive furlough and arranged counselling. A medical report seen by The Sunday Times describes her as suffering severe PTSD as a result of the incident. Repeated panic attacks in the night have, she says, left her barely sleeping.
Florence suggested that she be put in touch with Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, a leading voice on women’s rights. “Helena listened to me when no one else was,” she said. “I wish everyone had a woman like that on their side.”
Kennedy was outraged. “I was once the chair of the British Council and I firmly believe in cross cultural collaborations,” she says. “It is through connection and mutual sharing of our arts and knowledge and ideas that we create a better world.
“For a man who is a leading minister of his nation to grossly violate a women who is there to organise a major cultural event is criminal. The UAE should sack him immediately but I suspect that will not happen. His family owns the country.”
As soon as lockdown ended, McNamara went to the police, giving a three hour video interview at the Family Unit in Stratford, east London.
The police took concerns about her security so seriously that they fitted panic alarms in her flat and assigned her a female detective who has been checking in with her every week
“His power and influence spans so much of the world including this country,” says McNamara.
She is determined to bring him to book. Baroness Kennedy organised for leading London lawyers Carter Ruck to represent her pro bono and set about looking at whether they could prosecute Nahyan in this country under Universal Jurisdiction laws, which they argue should means human rights abuses such as torture and detaining someone against their will, can be tried in any country.
A legal opinion has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. McNamara was told a decision was expected last month on whether they would go ahead but they are still waiting.
For the same reason she came forward to The Sunday Times and waived her anonymity. “I feel I have nothing to lose,” she said. “ I want to do this because I want to highlight the effect of powerful men like him doing things like that and thinking they can get away with it. It seemed clear from the set up I was not the first or last. It really took a massive mental and physical toll on me for what to him was probably just a whim.”
Sheikh Nahyan did not respond to calls or messages from The Sunday Times over the allegations which were also sent via his press advisor. A letter was sent by London libel lawyers Schillings with the following statement: “Our client is surprised and saddened by this allegation, which arrives eight months after the alleged incident and via a national newspaper. The account is denied.”
Meanwhile the man who likes to be known as the Sheikh of Hearts continues claiming to promote tolerance. Last Thursday he was co-hosting the Arab Women Awards.
Text-by-text account
Events leading up to the alleged sexual assault on February 14 and its aftermath have been captured in text messages between the main parties.
Minister of tolerance who hosted Johnson and Blair
The United Arab Emirates is a strategic ally and trading partner for Britain, and Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan has hosted several UK leaders in his ministerial capacity, writes Dipesh Gadher.
In 2013 the sheikh, who is a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, welcomed Boris Johnson with a feast of camel meat during a trade mission. Johnson, who was then the mayor of London, was enthralled, and whipped out his phone to take a snap of the exotic meal.
Sheikh Nahyan was minister of culture and youth at the time. In that role he also hosted former prime minister Tony Blair at the opening of the UAE’s first global education and skills forum. The sheikh had previously been photographed alongside Blair at the Volvo Ocean Race in Abu Dhabi. After leaving office, Blair acted as a consultant to the emirates’ multibillion-pound sovereign wealth fund.
An Anglophile, Sheikh Nahyan, 69, was educated at Millfield School in Somerset and later Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a regular visitor to Britain and is believed to own a home in Hampstead, northwest London.
The sheikh casts himself as a progressive figure and has been in the UAE cabinet as the minister of tolerance since 2017. He has at least seven children.
