The New Yorker Radio Hour - From In the Dark: The Runaway Princesses

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

The wives and daughters of Dubai’s ruler live in unbelievable luxury. So why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed’s family keep trying to run away? The New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake joins In the Dark’s Madeleine Baran to tell the story of the royal women who risked everything to flee the brutality of one of the world’s most powerful men. In four episodes, drawing on thousands of pages of secret correspondence and never-before-heard audio recordings, “The Runaway Princesses” takes listeners behind palace walls, revealing a story of astonishing courage and cruelty. "The Runaway Princesses" is a four-part narrative series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Listen here: https://link.chtbl.com/itd_f New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, this is David Remnick from the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, you might recall that the team that makes the amazing award-winning podcast in the dark joined us here at The New Yorker recently. Season three of In the Dark is coming soon, but in the meantime, they've all paired up with the New Yorkers Heidi Blake and produced an extraordinary mini-series based on Heidi's investigative reporting into Dubai's powerful royal family. The series is called The Runaway Princesses. for an excerpt of the first episode, which is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello. My name is Latif Al-Mukhtum. I was born on December 5, 1985. My father is the Prime Minister of UAE and the ruler of Dubai, Muhammad bin Rashid Saeed Al-Makhtum. In February of 2018, a princess from the royal family in Dubai sneaked over to a friend's apartment and recorded a video.

I'm making this video because it could be the last video I make. It was part of a secret plan that took her years to put together, to escape from Dubai. The plan involved an inflatable dingy and jet skis and a yacht secretly wading out in the Indian Ocean. Princess Latifah left her video with friends. She told them to release it if something went wrong. And if you are watching the...

this video, it's not such a good thing. Either I'm dead or I'm in a very, very, very bad situation. She said, I don't know what's happening outside. I hear gunshots, men. And then we just heard nothing. It was just a complete blank. Where are they? What have they done to them? Are they dead? Are they not dead? How did this video get to us? What the hell do we do now? There is one suspect. Her father, the Sheikh. I'm Madeline Barron, and this is the runaway princesses from In the Dark. and The New Yorker. It's a story from my colleague Heidi Blake.

She's an investigative reporter. I've been investigating Dubai's royal family and its powerful leader. And trying to answer the question, why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed's family keep trying to run away? Heidi got access to communications between Princess Latifah and her friends, letters and texts, and audio and video recordings too, things that no journalist had ever reported before. We're going to tell you the story of what happens.

Heidi uncovered in four episodes. This is episode one, sisters. So Heidi, where do we start? Well, it starts back in 2017. Hey, how are you doing? So I was talking to a source of mine in the UK, a detective called Colin Sutton. While we were talking, Colin mentioned a case that he'd started to investigate years before, that he just couldn't get out of his mind.

There was this allegation that had been made by a sex worker who said that she'd been picked up in London, and then taking to an address in Surrey where she'd been held for a number of days and abused. So this was a 20-year-old woman who said that she'd been picked up in London by a chauffeur and then driven back to this extraordinary opulent manor house at the centre of a sweeping estate in Surrey. And she said that while she was there,

she'd been held captive for several days and repeatedly raped by a man who she said was a member of Dubai's ruling family. He said that this woman, had finally got away from the house and had gone straight to the police to report the crime, and he got a call from the dispatch room telling him to go out and investigate. But when he was on his way to start looking into this, he got a call from another officer he knew, a guy who worked in Special Branch, which is the secretive unit of the British police

that deals with national security matters. He was adamant that we can't do anything about it. It had come from on high, from, you know, the home office even, that it will all be sorted and payments will be made, and it'll all be. swept away. He said that it was all going to be worked out privately, government to government, and that this woman would be paid for her time. When I asked Surrey Police about it,

they told me the reason they had to drop the case was it wasn't possible to identify the perpetrator the woman had accused. But Colin told me the guy from Special Branch had told him that wasn't the real reason. The real reason, he said, was that the estate where this rape had allegedly happened is owned by one of the richest and most powerful people in the world. A man with connections to women,

world leaders not just in Britain but all around the globe. His name is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Muqtum. And what Colin told me was that the British government didn't want to damage its valuable relationship with him. Sometimes things that involve national security or things that involve great questions of state and the whole country are deemed to be bigger than one individual's crime or one individual's victimisation and we might not like it but I was realistic enough to understand that that's the way the world worked and that was what was going to have to happen. That is an incredibly rare thing to hear a police officer admitting. He was actually telling me I was told to drop a case for political reasons.

That's almost unheard of. I should note that a spokesperson for Surrey Police said their inquiry was thorough and there was no evidence of government meddling. But when I dug more into the Sheikh who owned that estate, I found that this was far from being the only time that a woman had tried to escape one of his properties after claiming that she'd suffered appalling abuses. Nor was it the only time that powerful foreign governments had taken his side. So tell me a little bit more about this Sheikh.

So Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is the absolute ruler of Dubai, and he's also the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, and it's a small but incredibly wealthy country. Sheikh Mohammed is in his own right one of the world's richest people, and he lives a life of extraordinary glamour and opulence. There was one summer when he and one of his wives spent two million dollars on strawberries. Two million dollars on strawberries. Yeah, on strawberries.

Although when I told my editor this story, he said that that did sound about right for organic. Editor jokes. Okay. So he's incredibly wealthy, obviously. Where does all this money come from? Well, it started with oil, but it's much more than that now. He's poured the country's vast riches into this enormous global property portfolio. I mean, this is the guy who basically created Dubai from scratch. Like it was a, a tiny fishing village when he was born, and he's the guy who's credited with almost single-handedly crafting this vision for this country to just spring almost overnight from the desert

with its incredibly famous skyline. Skisgraper's rise in clusters, man-made islands rise from the sea, and it is all the vision of one man, Sheikh Muhammad bin Rashid Amakhtun. This is where we're standing now. Oh, this is nothing. This was desert. And look now, all those are. to see you.

Dubai's airport is now the world's busiest international hub, and Dubai has the world's tallest building and its most luxurious hotel, and even an indoor ski slope with live penguins. Live penguins? Live penguins, no less. Like, everything they do, they do on this incredibly extreme scale. They have these man-made islands, like there's one in the shape of a palm tree, and then there's another archipelago, which represents a map of the entire world.

And there are even plans to build a gigantic replica of the, moon. It's going to cost $5 billion, and they're planning to perch it on top of one of the city's tall buildings. It's like this fantasy place where someone can come up with like the wildest thing and they're just like, we have all the money, let's just make it. And let's make it on an extraordinary scale. Right. And it's all at the direction of the ruler, Sheikh Mohammed. And he's a really fascinating character. So at home in Dubai, he cultivates the image of a traditional Arab leader. He styles himself as a family man and he writes Nabati poetry, which he publishes on his Instagram page and on YouTube and on his own website.

It's pretty florid. Shane Muhammad is also a champion endurance horseman. He's the world's biggest owner of thoroughbred race horses. Horses have a really special place in Bedouin culture. But his stature in international horse racing also earned him a valuable relationship with the late Queen of England, who herself had a passion for the sport. Really?

Yes, she would actually often invite him to, sit with her in the royal box at Ascot. And he's close to a lot of really powerful people. He's a very important strategic ally to Western governments, particularly after 9-11 when Dubai really cracked down on terror financing through its banks and also became the US Navy's biggest foreign port of call. And he's also poured tens of billions of dollars of UAE's money into the economies of both the US and Britain. And he's personally one of Britain's biggest private landowners. And it's his connection to Britain that got you really interested in the story, right?

Right. He seemed to have so much power and influence here. And I wanted to understand more about how he was using it. So how do you get started investigating someone like this, someone this wealthy, this powerful, this connected? Well, one of the things I guess I've kind of learned over the years, particularly reported on some of the super rich and powerful oligarchs who fell foul of the Kremlin, was that these People are surrounded by so many servants and aids, in fact totems and kind of helpers of so many kinds,

that they forget that these people are human beings who kind of have eyes and ears and consciences and sometimes feel uncomfortable about things that they're seeing. And people who maybe might one day decide to talk to somebody like me. And so I figured, well, let's go talk to some of those guys. Hello. Oh, hello. Is that Mr. Sinabad? Yes, speaking.

Hi. So while I was rooting around looking at Sheikh Mohammed's former employees, I saw that there was one man who'd filed an unfair dismissal claim against him. And this guy had worked for Sheikh Mohammed as a chauffeur for 17 years before he was let go. His name is Jury Sinabad. I asked him what it was like working for Sheikh Mohammed. He's able to take a long time to answer that question. And I said, well, great, let's take a long time.

So we ended up talking for at least two hours on the phone that day. we spoke a bunch more times, and we met in person several times as well. What did he tell you? So he told me he'd worked with Sheikh Mohammed for 17 years. And during that time, he told me, and actually he told me this unprompted. I didn't even ask him about this. He just volunteered it, that he had been asked to bring limousines full of young women night after night back to the estate where Sheikh Mohammed was staying.

He didn't know exactly what was going on inside the house, but he just knew he got a call when it was finished. And when he drove them home, they'd be counting money in the back of the car. The women were obviously well compensated for what they were doing, but he told me that some of them really weren't happy, and he was haunted in particular by the memory of one young woman. He remembers picking up a group of them at the estate at the end of one night and dropping them back in London.

They all came out, but she stayed in the car, crying. Oh. And blood at the seats. Blood on the seats? Yes. It was blood next to her where it was. sitting on the floor. Uh-huh, on the floor.

It made me feel sick now. She was shivering, you know, like somebody who cry, but doesn't cry loud, like a dog. I don't know if you understand what I mean. I know what you mean, whimpering. Wimpering, yes, well. Yeah. And then he told me another really awful story as well. He said there was another occasion when a woman had tried to escape from the house

and had been chased into the bushes and beaten by a member of Sheikh Mohammed's staff. He said that she came out half-clothed and he was then tasked with driving her back to London. And he noticed when she got into the car that her body was covered in bruises. And he told me that she cried all the way home. After speaking with him at length, I tracked down a group of other drivers who'd worked for. for Sheikh Mohammed over the years, as well as some of his former bodyguards and other members of staff. And several of them confirmed what's in about had told me about the way that these carloads of women were brought back to the estate every night. We should note that Sheikh Mohammed's attorneys deny that he exploited sex workers.

So you were the first reporter to really figure out that this was going on, and that would have been a big story all by itself. But you end up reporting that it's not just sex workers who are trying to escape from the sheep. Sheikh's palaces and getting no help from police? No. Because the next thing I learned was that several women in Sheikh Mohammed's own family had also tried to run away from him, including two of his own daughters. These women were willing to risk everything to get free of his control, even their own lives. To hear the rest of this episode, follow in the dark wherever you get your podcasts.