AMANDA PLATELL: I've spent 40 years being groped, grabbed, assaulted and kissed without consent. Now I'm about to expose the bosses who attacked me
Picture the scene. It is the late 1990s and I am a senior executive within a national newspaper group. This means I attend the weekly board meeting – I am the only woman who does – and one day, I get there early to find the room empty.
A minute or so later, another senior editorial figure within the group appears and takes the seat next to me, whereupon he proceeds to casually – as if he were merely straightening his pen on the table or reading the very newspaper we produce – slip his hand up my skirt and grope 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 on his office desk if you’re wearing tights?’
Frankly I was mortified. I should have felt proud, rightly taking my place at the board table, but instead he left me feeling grubby, humiliated and incandescent with rage.
I replied: ‘I have your wife’s phone number. Touch me ever again and she’s the first person I will report you to.’
I was outraged, yes, and baffled by the man’s assumption that this was in any way acceptable behaviour – for God’s sake, did he think I’d think it was sexy? – but I wasn’t shocked.
Amanda Platell says some of the harassment she experienced was so beyond the pale, the incidents have stayed with her for years
To be honest, this sort of incident had been happening to me at the hands, literally, of various men for years – and to many (most?), other women, too.
What brought it back to me was the Gregg Wallace scandal, and the idea that an entitled man could pose such an obstacle to women’s ability not just to thrive in the workplace, but to exist in it at all.
Indeed, sparked by the alleged sexual antics of Wallace at work (at work!), a horrid kaleidoscope of buried memories have come flooding back. Some, it’s true, I dismissed as workplace horseplay, but others were so beyond the pale, they have stayed with me all these years later.
It left me more furious than ever, wondering why we women had to learn to ‘cope’ with the office lech, the ‘amorous’ colleague and the downright manipulative boss, who felt it was their right to take advantage of us.
I was lucky in one way. I grew up in Australia and my dad Frank, also a journalist, both warned and prepared me for ‘unwanted attention’ at work. The first time it happened, I was a 21-year-old newly graduated apprentice journalist on a provincial evening newspaper in Perth. Part of my job was to type up the headlines from the 5am radio news, sitting at a desk in a tiny windowless office long before most of the staff arrived.
One day, in walked a much older colleague who – what a nice surprise – appeared to have a cup of coffee for me. I can remember it now – can almost smell the stale Old Spice aftershave – as he reached over my shoulder, too close for comfort, to put the coffee down in front of me. Then shoved his hand down my shirt, squeezed my breast hard and tried to creep his gnarled old hand inside my bra.
I followed Dad’s advice and ripped his hand from my blouse, stood up and bent his arm hard behind his back saying: ‘Try that again and I’ll break your arm.’ I was young and strong, but inside I was shaking.
Months later I discovered he had regularly molested a much younger female apprentice, who was so traumatised she quit her job. Sadly for so many working women, they didn’t have dads like mine.
He taught me a few more good tricks: if someone is trying to stick his tongue down your throat, bite the top of his ear hard and he’ll back off. If he’s mauling you, bend back sharply his little finger – if he doesn’t stop, you can snap it like a pretzel.
Amanda Platell, pictured in 2001, has kept a detailed diary of her more than 40 years in journalism
Yet my dad’s advice did not prepare me for the more subtle sexual predators I was to encounter later in my career.
An early incident in London springs too readily to mind. As a junior executive on a national newspaper, my boss – the editor – asked me out for dinner to ‘discuss my future’. Of course, I was flattered that this might be a step up on the career ladder, especially as he had booked supper at The Savoy River Room, overlooking the Thames. On my salary, I’d never been able to afford to go there.
It wasn’t just dinner, it turned out, it was dancing, too. And when my married boss, more than 30 years older than me (I was in my late 20s) gripped me rather too tightly on the dancefloor, I realised with horror that, as Mae West said, he was very pleased to see me. We sat down again. There was some chat about what a promising journalist I was, how far I could go, and then the waiter delivered the bill – along with a set of room keys.
I’ll never forget those keys, a large brass bauble and an elaborate flourish of tassels, and him whispering: ‘I’ve booked a suite for us for the night.’
Call me naïve, call me anything, but I did not expect a dinner to discuss my career would, in his mind, end on a casting couch. He was a married father, old enough to be my own dad, and I too was (just) married. I’m glad to say that before I made my hasty exit, I reminded him of it.
I’ve never been to The Savoy again. It left such a horrible impression on me, I couldn’t bring myself to. That he wasn’t there to give me a foot up on my career ladder but to get his leg over. That I wouldn’t advance in my job without seriously compromising myself; that what mattered most was not how good a journalist I was but how far I would go to satisfy his middle-aged male fantasies.
In the end I climbed the ladder, as women will do if they are allowed to, through hard work and being really good at the job.
More terrible memories tumble out. Having just arrived back from Australia, where I’d been for my brother Michael’s funeral – he was 40, I was 37 – my bosses insisted I attend a Park Lane media awards event representing my newspaper.
I recall I held back the tears during the excruciatingly long ceremony. I was wearing an Amanda Wakeley cross-grained midnight blue cowl-neck dress – funny how these images stay with you, as though your memory buries the bad stuff and recalls the minutiae.
I stayed for the awards then ordered a cab, and was sitting in the foyer sobbing, when the married editor of another national newspaper came and sat down beside me. Seeing I was in some distress and knowing I had lost my brother – I had of course written about his death – he hugged me, at first in a friendly, comforting way.
And then, out of nowhere, he attempted a full-throttle kiss, shoving his tongue down my throat and leaving me gagging.
‘Don’t let people see you like this, come up to my suite. I’ll look after you,’ he said, and tried to drag me upstairs. I fled into the night paralysed with disgust.
My time in politics as William Hague’s spin doctor was marked by it, too. I recall one party conference, when a colleague insisted he needed a late-night debriefing in my hotel room before the next day’s expected tumultuous events.
I should have got the hint he wanted a ‘debriefing’ in every sense of the word – no sooner had he entered my room than he sprung, lunging at me, trying to rip off the Nicole Farhi off-the-shoulder dress I’d worn for the evening’s formal dinner.
I removed myself to the other side of the room and told him there were armed Met Police officers throughout the hotel and CCTV cameras in every corridor. How would he explain sneaking dishevelled out of my bedroom in the small hours of the morning? How would he explain the headlines to his wife and three kids?
I escaped, or so I thought, to the bar at the conference hotel where a happily married senior Member of Her Majesty’s Opposition constantly placed his hand on my bottom, squeezing it, until I whispered in his ear a threat to reveal gossip about him that I cannot repeat here without compromising his identity.
Then, perhaps most surprisingly of all, when 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 business as usual for me, I was head-to-toe in black Issey Miyake – those minute details again – and to be fair to him he was indeed concerned about allegations of bias. He invited me out to lunch to talk about the issue, but en route suggested a detour. Could I help him buy a winter coat? It was a curiously intimate request, I thought, and hardly pertinent to the problem at hand, but I agreed, hoping we’d talk as we shopped.
Thinking back now I’m astonished at my naivety that I went along with it. What kind of man thought it was appropriate to ask me help him buy a coat during a work meeting? Isn’t that a job for his wife, or his lover?
So no lunch, but much stroking of cashmere coats – and then the text messages started arriving. He imagined, he told me, placing his hand ‘high up on the inside of your left thigh, very high’. It was so totally inappropriate for any working relationship with a professional woman and I shudder to remember it now.
People think women like me have been toughened at the coalface of what is still the mainly male-dominated profession of journalism, and that we’re somehow impervious to it all. We are not.
The reason we might seem that way is that women of my age, 67, in my industry, have had no choice but to construct a carapace against it to weather what might have been career-ending or career-advancing proposals.
And yet recalling those bad old days makes me feel very sad. And knowing it still goes on – in celebrity kitchens allegedly, as well as ordinary offices up and down the land – makes me sadder still. So many women having to fight off sexual predators and casual sexism in the workplace, while managing to keep our dignity and our careers. If I were the crying kind, it would make me weep.
Finally, a footnote to my rambling kaleidoscope reminiscences. It’s not for the men’s sake that I’ve 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. A few of the guilty are now dead, but some are still powerful names and they know who they are.
I have spared their blushes, yet as a journalist of more than 40 years I have, of course, kept a detailed diary. I have also kept every mobile phone I have ever had, with their grim ‘sex texts’ intact on them. They are in a locked drawer. For now.
When I write my autobiography, I’ll decide whether I can stand to read them again – and tell you who sent them.
