Janan George Harb (Arabic: جنان حرب; born 1947) is a former wife of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.[1] [2]
Janan Harb was born in Ramallah, Palestine, in 1947 to a Christian Arab family.[3] She met Prince Fahd at a party in Jeddah in December 1967.[3] They married in a secret ceremony in Jeddah in March 1968, and she had been converted into Islam just before the marriage.[3] [4] They lived in Jeddah and London during their marriage.[3] She introduced some of her friends to Prince Fahd who was the interior minister during that period to enable them to get jobs or visas.[3] [5]
She says that she was forced by senior royals including Prince Salman and Prince Turki, full brothers of Prince Fahd, to leave Saudi Arabia in 1970.[4] They thought that she was responsible for the addiction of Prince Fahd to methadone which he had begun to use following chronic stomach pains in 1969.[3] She rejects any role in the addiction of her ex-husband.[3] Harb left Saudi Arabia and first went to Beirut and to the US.[3] In 1974 she married a Lebanese lawyer with whom she has two daughters.
To the embarrassment to the Saudi royal family she launched a £400m maintenance claim against King Fahd in 2004, a year before Fahd's death.[2] In 2016 she lost the case.[6]
Janan Harb published a book entitled The Saudi King and I in which her relationship with King Fahd is detailed. The story has been sold for making a film which is provisionally titled The Sins of King Fahd, and a three-minute teaser of the film was posted to YouTube.[7]