Introducing The Runaway Princesses from In The Dark and The New Yorker
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The ruling family of Dubai lives a life of unbelievable luxury. It's truly a lifestyle most can only dream of. So why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed's family keep trying to run away?

From In the Dark and The New Yorker, an investigative reporter gets a glimpse behind the palace walls in this extraordinary new miniseries, The Runaway Princesses. Keep listening for an excerpt of the first episode of In the Dark, The Runaway Princesses, which is now available wherever you get your podcasts. Hello.

My name is Latifa Al Maktoum. I was born on December 5, 1985. My father is the prime minister of UAE and the ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Saeed Al Maktoum. 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 dinghy and jet skis and a yacht secretly waiting out in the Indian Ocean. Princess Latifa left her video with friends. She told them to release it if something went wrong. And if you are watching this video, it's not such a good thing. Either I'm dead or I'm in a very, very, very bad situation.

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 Latifa 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 Heidi uncovered in four episodes. This is episode one, Sisters.

So Heidi, where do we start? Well, it starts back in 2017. Heidi, hello, it's Colin Sutton. Colin, 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 taken 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 extraordinarily 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 the Home Office even, that it will all be sorted and payments will be made and it will 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 world leaders not just in Britain but all around the globe. His name is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. And what Colin told me was that the British government didn't want to damage its valuable relationship with him.

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 $2 million on strawberries. $2 million 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 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 like incredibly famous skyline.

Skyscrapers rise in clusters, man-made islands rise from the sea, and it is all the vision of one man, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. This is where we're standing now. All this is nothing. This was desert. And look now, all that you see.

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 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. Yeah.

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. Sheikh Mohammed is also a champion endurance horseman. He's the world's biggest owner of thoroughbred racehorses. 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

one of the things I guess I've kind of learned over the years, particularly reporting 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 aides and factotums 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. Oh, hello, is that Mr. Sinabad? Yes, speaking. Hi, yes, Heidi here at the New York... 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 Jureh Sinabad. I asked him what it was like working for Sheikh Mohammed. Well...

He said it would 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. And then 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. 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. I know what you mean, whimpering. 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.

You know, after speaking with him at length, I tracked down a group of other drivers who'd worked 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 Sinabad had told me about the way that, you know, 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 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.