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

Imagine the scene. It’s the late 1990s and I’m a senior executive within a national newspaper group. This means I attend the weekly board meeting – I’m the only woman who does – and one day when I get there early, the room is empty.

About a minute later, another editor-in-chief appears within the group and sits down next to me, then casually – as if he’s just putting his pen on the table or reading the newspaper we’re producing – extends his hand. lift my skirt and feel my thigh.

“I just wanted to check if you were wearing stockings,” he said. ‘I never trust a woman in pantyhose. How can a man have sex on his desk if you’re wearing pantyhose?’

To be honest, I was terrified. I should have felt proud and rightfully taken a seat at the boardroom table, but instead he left me dirty, humiliated and burning with anger.

I replied, “I have your wife’s phone number. Touch me ever again and she’ll be the first person I’ll report you to.”

I was outraged, yes, and dismayed by the man’s assumption that this was in any way acceptable behavior – for God’s sake, did he think I would find it sexy? – but I wasn’t shocked.

To be honest, incidents like this have been happening to me for years, literally, at the hands of various men – 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 be such an obstacle to women’s ability to not only thrive in the workplace, but to exist there at all.

Sparked by Wallace’s alleged sexual antics at work (at work!), a horrifying kaleidoscope of hidden memories has indeed returned. It’s true that I dismissed some as workplace jokes, but others were so incomprehensible that they have stuck with me all these years later.

I became more furious than ever and wondered why we women had to learn to ‘deal’ with the office scum, 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 father Frank, also a journalist, warned and prepared me for ‘unwanted attention’ at work. The first time this happened, I was a 21-year-old newly graduated student journalist at a provincial evening newspaper in Perth. Part of my job involved typing out the headlines of 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 and – what a nice surprise – seemed to have a cup of coffee for me. I can remember now – I can almost smell the stale Old Spice aftershave – as he reached over my shoulder, too close for comfort, to place the coffee in front of me. Then he pushed his hand down my shirt, squeezed my breast hard, and tried to get his gnarled old hand into my bra.

I took Dad’s advice and yanked his hand out of my blouse, stood up and bent his arm hard behind his back and said, “Try that again and I’ll break your arm.” I was young and strong, but inside I was shaking.

Months later I discovered that he had regularly harassed a much younger female student, who was so traumatized that she quit her job. Unfortunately for so many working women, they didn’t have a father like mine.

He taught me a few more good tricks: If someone tries to stick his tongue down your throat, bite down hard on the top of his ear and he’ll pull away. If he mauls you, bend his little finger back sharply. If he doesn’t stop, you can snap him off like a pretzel.

Yet my father’s advice did not prepare me for the more subtle sexual predators I would encounter later in my career.

An early incident in London comes too easily to mind. As a junior executive at a national newspaper, my boss – the editor – asked me out to dinner to ‘discuss my future’. Naturally, I was flattered that this could be a step up the career ladder, especially as he had booked dinner at The Savoy River Room, overlooking the Thames. With my salary I could never have afforded to go there.

It turned out to not only be a dinner, but there was also dancing. And when my married boss, more than thirty years older than me (I was in my late twenties), held me a little too tightly on the dance floor, I realized with horror that he was, as Mae West said, very happy to see me. We sat down again. There was some talk about what a promising journalist I was, how far I could go, and then the waiter came to hand over the bill – along with a set of room keys.

I’ll never forget those keys, a large brass bauble and an elaborate tassel decoration, and him whispering, “I’ve booked us a suite for the night.”

Call me naive, call me whatever, but I didn’t expect a dinner to discuss my career to end up on a casting couch in his eyes. He was a married father, old enough to be my own father, and I too was (just) married. I’m happy to say I reminded him of that before I left in haste.

I never went to The Savoy again. It made such a terrible impression on me that I couldn’t bear it. That he wasn’t there to move me up my career ladder, but to get his leg over the threshold. That I would make no progress in my work without seriously endangering myself; that the most important thing wasn’t how good a journalist I was, but how far I would go to satisfy his middle-aged male fantasies.

Ultimately, I climbed the ladder, as women will do if they are allowed to, by working hard and being very good at their jobs.

More terrible memories come flooding back. When I first got back from Australia, where I had been for my brother Michael’s funeral – he was 40, I was 37 – my bosses insisted I attend a media awards ceremony in Park Lane representing my newspaper.

I remember holding back tears during the terribly long ceremony. I wore a midnight blue dress with a draped neckline by Amanda Wakeley – funny how these images stay with you, as if your memory buries the bad things and you remember the details.

I stayed for the awards ceremony and then ordered a taxi, and was sitting in the foyer sobbing, when the married editor of another national newspaper sat down next to me. When he saw that I was in some distress and knew that I had lost my brother – I had of course written about his death – he hugged me, at first in a kind, reassuring way.

And then, out of nowhere, he tried to kiss full throttle, shoving his tongue down my throat and leaving me gagging.

“Don’t let people see you like that, come to my suite. I’ll take care of you,” he said and tried to drag me upstairs. Paralyzed with disgust, I fled into the night.

My time in politics as a spin doctor for William Haag was also characterized by this. I remember one party conference, when a colleague insisted he needed a late debriefing in my hotel room, before the expected tumultuous events of the next day.

I should have gotten the hint that he wanted a ‘debriefing’ in every sense of the word – as soon as he entered my room, he jumped up and lunged at me in an attempt to take off Nicole Farhi’s off-the-shoulder dress that I had wanted. worn for the evening’s formal dinner.

I went to the other side of the room and told him that there were armed police officers everywhere in the hotel and cameras in every hallway. How would he explain sneaking sloppily out of my bedroom in the wee hours of the morning? How would he explain the headlines to his wife and three children?

I escaped, or so I thought, to the bar of the conference hotel where a happily married senior member of Her Majesty’s Opposition kept putting his hand on my buttocks and squeezing them until I whispered a threat in his ear to spread gossip about him. reveal that I cannot repeat this here without compromising his identity.

Then, perhaps most surprising of all, working in politics, I requested a meeting with a left-wing media executive to discuss the hostile coverage we felt we were receiving.

For me it was business as usual, I was in Issey Miyake’s black from head to toe – those little details again – and to be honest he was indeed concerned about accusations of bias. He invited me to lunch to discuss the matter, but along the way he suggested a detour. Can I help him buy a winter coat? It was an oddly intimate request, I thought, and hardly relevant to the problem at hand, but I agreed, hoping we’d talk while we shopped.

When I think back on it now, I’m surprised at my naivety in going along with it. What kind of man thought it was appropriate to ask me to help him buy a jacket during a work meeting? Isn’t that a task for his wife, or for his lover?

So no lunch, but lots of caressing cashmere coats – and then the text messages started arriving. He introduced himself, he told me, as he placed his hand “high on the inside of your left thigh, very high.” It was so completely inappropriate for any working relationship with a professional woman and I shudder to think about it now.

People think that women like me have become hardened at the grassroots of what is still the largely male-dominated profession of journalism, and that we are somehow desensitized to it. That’s not us.

The reason we appear this way is that women my age, 67, in my industry have had no choice but to build a shield against it to withstand proposals that could end or advance their careers.

And yet I feel very sad when I think back to those bad old days. And knowing that it’s still going on – reportedly in celebrity kitchens, but also in regular offices around the country – makes me even sadder. So many women must fight sexual predators and casual sexism in the workplace, while managing to maintain our dignity and our careers. If I were the crying kind, it would make me cry.

Finally, a footnote to my turbulent kaleidoscope memories. It is not in the interests of the men that I have not identified anyone who tried to compromise me and make my life a misery, however short, but in the interests of their families. Some of the guilty parties are dead now, but some are still powerful names and they know who they are.

I have spared them blushes, but as a journalist of over forty years I have of course kept a detailed diary. I’ve also kept every cell phone I’ve ever owned, with the grim “sex texts” on it intact. They are in a locked drawer. For now.

When I write my autobiography, I’ll decide whether I dare to read them again – and I’ll tell you who sent them.