A three-minute teaser of the film, The Sins of King Fahd was posted to YouTube on Friday and is based on a true story.
The film is about the life of the late Saudi king Fahd bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and includes scandalous activities of drug-taking, gambling, and forced abortions by the Saudi royal family.
The film is based on Janan Harb’s soon to be released autobiography “The Saudi King and I”, which narrates her life as a young Palestinian-born Christian who fled home as a teenager and ended up in Saudi Arabia, where she says she met, courted, and eventually married King Fahd.
Last year Harb was awarded a £20 mn ($26.4 mn) settlement from one of King Fahd’s sons but in June this year, following apparent pressure from Riyadh, a London court ordered a retrial to review if Harb is entitled to £12 million and two luxury properties in Chelsea.
The clip posted on YouTube includes scenes portraying King Fahd injecting drugs and gambling in London, as well as upsetting images of a forced abortion carried out on a woman who says she was the Saudi leader’s secret wife.
Janan Harb, 68, a Palestinian-born Christian, says she converted to Islam back in 1968 and thereafter as a 20-year-old, she married the 47-year-old Fahd, who was at the time Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and first in line to the throne.
But the royal family didn’t like Harb and in 1970 she was forced to flee Saudi Arabia at two hours’ notice after Fahd’s brother Salman, the current king, told him to get rid of her and her family. Harb who now lives in London and is a scientologist says she knew Salman back when she lived in the palace with Fahd, but she doesn’t speak highly of him.
“He is not one of the nice people. I called him the ‘Butcher of Riyadh’ because of how he executed so many people,” she said, in a reference to Salman’s governorship of Saudi capital Riyadh. “He didn’t have a good reputation, he was very aggressive. He was the one behind me being told to leave. He was a dictator.”
Harb had told a London court she secretly married the King Fahd in 1968 when he was still a prince. She testified that he had promised to look after her financially for the rest of her life. Palestinian-born Harb had told the court the king’s family opposed their marriage. She said in a statement: “Fahd was concerned about how this would be viewed by the Saudi public, many of whom follow a strict interpretation of Islam that preaches deep enmity and hostility to all other religions. It was for this reason that in March 1968 we underwent a discreet ceremony of marriage.”
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