Imagine the scene. It’s the late 1990s and I’m a senior executive at a national newspaper group. This means that I attend the weekly board meeting (I’m the only woman who does) and one day I arrive early to find the room empty.
A minute later, another high-ranking editorial figure within the group appears and takes a seat next to me, after which he proceeds to casually (as if he were simply straightening his pen on the table or reading the same newspaper we produce) slide his hand . He lifts my skirt and touches my thigh.
“I just wanted to check if you’re wearing stockings,” he said. ‘I never trust a woman in tights. How can a man have sex at his office desk if he’s wearing stockings?
Frankly I was mortified. I should have been proud to rightfully take my place at the board table, but instead, I was left feeling dirty, humiliated, and incandescent with rage.
I replied, ‘I have your wife’s phone number. If you touch me again, she will be the first person I report you to.
I felt outraged, yes, and bewildered by the man’s assumption that this was somehow acceptable behavior. For God’s sake, did he think I would think he was sexy? – but it didn’t surprise me.
Amanda Platell says some of the harassment she experienced was so unacceptable that the incidents have stayed with her for years.
To be honest, these types of incidents had literally been happening to me at the hands of various men for years, and to many (most?) other women as well.
What brought me back was the Gregg Wallace scandal and the idea that an entitled man could pose such an obstacle to women’s ability to not only thrive in the workplace, but to exist in it.
In fact, sparked by Wallace’s alleged sexual antics at work (at work!), a horrible kaleidoscope of buried memories has returned. Admittedly, some I dismissed as workplace antics, but others were so out of character that they have stayed with me all these years later.
It left me angrier than ever, wondering why we women had to learn to “deal” with the office rake, the “loving” colleague, and the downright manipulative boss who felt he had the right to take advantage of us.
I was lucky in one sense. I grew up in Australia and my father Frank, also a journalist, warned and prepared me for “unwanted attention” at work. The first time it happened, I was a 21-year-old recently graduated trainee journalist at a provincial evening newspaper in Perth. Part of my job was writing the headlines for the 5 a.m. radio news, sitting at a desk in a small, windowless office long before most of the staff arrived.
One day a much older colleague came in who, what a pleasant surprise, seemed to have a cup of coffee for me. I remember now (I can almost smell the stale Old Spice aftershave) when he reached over my shoulder, too close for comfort, and set the coffee in front of me. Then he put his hand under my shirt, squeezed my chest hard, and tried to slide his old, gnarled hand inside my bra.
I followed Dad’s advice and ripped his hand out of my shirt, stood up and bent his arm tightly behind his back saying, “Try that again and I’ll break your arm.” He was young and strong, but inside he was shaking.
Months later I discovered that he had regularly sexually abused a much younger trainee, who was so traumatized that she quit her job. Unfortunately for many working women, they did not have fathers like mine.
He taught me a few more tricks: If someone tries to stick their tongue down your throat, bite the top of their ear hard and they’ll back away. If he is attacking you, sharply bend his little finger back; If it doesn’t stop, you can break it like a pretzel.
Amanda Platell, pictured in 2001, has kept a detailed diary of her more than 40 years in journalism.
However, my father’s advice did not prepare me for the more subtle sexual predators I would encounter later in my career.
An incident in London comes to mind all too easily. As a junior executive at a national newspaper, my boss (the editor) invited me to dinner to “discuss my future.” Of course, I was flattered that this could be a career step forward, especially as I had booked dinner at The Savoy River Room, overlooking the Thames. With my salary, I had never been able to afford to go there.
It turned out that it was not just a dinner, but also a dance. And when my married boss, more than 30 years my senior (I was in my twenties) grabbed me a little too hard on the dance floor, I realized with horror that, as Mae West said, he was very happy to see me. We sat down again. There was a conversation about how promising I was as a journalist, how far I could go, and then the waiter handed over the bill, along with a set of room keys.
I’ll never forget those keys, a large brass bauble and elaborate tassel decoration, and him whispering, “I’ve reserved a suite for us for the night.”
Call me naive, call me whatever you want, but I didn’t expect a dinner to discuss my career to end, in his opinion, on a casting couch. He was a married father, old enough to be my own father, and I was also (newly) married. I’m glad to say that before I rushed out, I reminded him of that.
I have never been to The Savoy again. It left such a horrible impression on me that I didn’t dare do it. That he wasn’t there to give me a foot on the career ladder, but to help me get through it. That I would not advance in my work without seriously committing myself; that what mattered most was not how good a journalist he was but how far he would go to satisfy his middle-aged male fantasies.
In the end I climbed the ladder, as women do if they are allowed to, through hard work and being really good at the job.
More terrible memories arise. Having just returned from Australia where I attended my brother Michael’s funeral (he was 40 and I was 37), my bosses insisted I attend a Park Lane media awards event on behalf of my newspaper.
I remember holding back tears during the excruciatingly long ceremony. She wore a midnight blue, roll-neck, cross-flower dress by Amanda Wakeley. It’s funny how these images stay with you, as if your memory buries the bad things and remembers the minutiae.
I stayed to watch the awards, then ordered a taxi and was sitting in the lobby sobbing, when the married editor of another national newspaper came and sat next to me. Seeing that I was distraught and knowing that I had lost my brother (of course, I had written about his death), she hugged me, at first in a friendly and comforting way.
And then, out of nowhere, he tried to kiss me at full speed, shoving his tongue down my throat and leaving me gagging.
‘Don’t let people see you like that, go up to my suite. “I’ll take care of you,” he said, and tried to drag me up the stairs. I fled into the night paralyzed by disgust.
My time in politics as an advisor to William Hague was also marked by this. I remember one party conference where a colleague insisted that I needed a late-night briefing in my hotel room before the tumultuous events expected the next day.
I should have realized that he wanted an ‘interrogation’ in every sense of the word: as soon as he entered my room, he jumped up, lunged at me, and tried to rip off the off-the-shoulder Nicole Farhi dress I had worn to the wedding. formal evening dinner.
I moved to the other side of the room and told him there were armed Metropolitan Police officers throughout the hotel and CCTV cameras in every hallway. How would I explain leaving my room disheveled in the wee hours of the morning? How would you explain the headlines to your wife and three children?
I escaped, or so I thought, to the bar of the conference hotel where a senior member of Her Majesty’s Opposition, happily married, constantly put his hand on my behind, squeezing it, until I whispered in his ear a threat to reveal gossip. about him that I cannot repeat it here without compromising his identity.
Then, perhaps most surprising of all, when I was working in politics, I asked for a meeting with a left-wing media executive to discuss the hostile coverage we felt we were receiving.
It was all normal to me, he was dressed in head-to-toe Issey Miyake black (those minute details again) and, to be fair to him, I was actually concerned about accusations of bias. He invited me to lunch to talk about it, but on the way he suggested a detour. Could I help you buy a winter coat? It was a curiously intimate request, I thought, and hardly relevant to the problem at hand, but I agreed, hoping that we would talk while we went shopping.
Now that I think back, I’m surprised at my naivety in accepting it. What kind of man thought it was appropriate to ask me to help him buy a coat during a work meeting? Isn’t that a job for your wife or your lover?
So no lunch, but a lot of cuddling in cashmere coats, and then the texts started coming. He imagined, he told me, placing his hand ‘very high on the inside of your left thigh, very high.’ It was totally inappropriate for any working relationship with a professional woman and I shudder thinking about it now.
People think that women like me have become hardened in what is still the largely male-dominated profession of journalism, and that we are somehow immune to it all. We are not.
The reason we might seem that way is that women my age, 67, in my industry, have had no choice but to build a shell against themselves to weather what might have been proposed to end their career or to advance in it.
And yet, remembering those bad times makes me feel very sad. And knowing that this is still going on (allegedly in celebrity kitchens as well as regular offices across the country) makes me even sadder. So many women have to fight sexual predators and casual sexism in the workplace, while managing to maintain our dignity and our careers. If I was the crying type, it would make me cry.
Finally, a footnote to my rambling kaleidoscopic reminiscences. It is not for the sake of the men that I have not identified any of those who tried to compromise me and make my life a misery, however briefly, but for the sake of their families. Some of the culprits are already dead, but some are still powerful names and they know who they are.
I have avoided their blushes, but as a journalist for more than 40 years, I have of course kept a detailed diary. I have also kept intact every mobile phone I have ever owned, with its shadowy ‘sexual texts’. They are in a locked drawer. For now.
When I write my autobiography, I will decide if I can read them again and tell you who sent them.