Jermaine Jenas has publicly apologised to two women after the BBC fired him for allegedly sending inappropriate messages. The pundit maintains that the communications were “consensual” but is “deeply sorry” for his actions.
Here, Sally Meeson reflects on her own experience of unsolicited texting from a senior BBC colleague – and why it's time we took this form of harassment more seriously.
I remember the conversation clearly. I was sat with my colleagues at a local BBC radio station as a junior producer in my early twenties. I'd asked what they thought I should do about a man who’d been bothering me at the gym, following me from fitness machine to fitness machine, from the pool to the jacuzzi to the sauna. Striking up unsolicited conversations, asking me out and making me feel extremely uncomfortable. My married senior colleague, who sat next to me, was the first to react:
“Report him to management immediately!” he bellowed.
“That’s outrageous behaviour. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. You should get him banned from the gym.”
Seconds later, the private messaging bar at the top of my computer screen started flashing. It appeared that my boss had something to quietly add to his previous loud and very public statement:
“But I can’t say that I blame him.”
It wasn’t just the content of that message which disturbed me. It was its surreptitious nature and the blatant hypocrisy. My boss had literally just preached to the entire room about the abhorrence of men who harass women with unwanted attention, while secretly carrying out the exact same action. I was shocked and disgusted. But since this man was a lot more senior than me and I didn’t want to cause a scene, I said nothing.
Dance pros Giovanni Pernice and Graziano Di Prima have been accused of inappropriate behaviour.
This would be the beginning of many such inappropriate messages my married boss would silently send to me via the secret medium of a “top-line message”. A steady drip, drip of sly innuendos, unwanted compliments and idle flirtation. Until one day he forgot himself and blurted something in public about why I got my job. He then appeared at work the following day pale-faced as if he hadn’t slept, quietly took me to a board room and said: “Sorry”.
That singular word seems to get used a lot by married men, like sacked BBC TV presenter and former footballer Jermaine Jenas, after they get found out. Yet while they are caught in the thrill of a cloak-and-dagger affair, carried out entirely digitally, convincing themselves they’re not really cheating, they rarely seem sorry at all.
Despite my old boss' apology, not long after I moved from local BBC radio to national TV in London, he started messaging me again; badgering me to meet him for coffee while he was in the capital, something we had never even done when we were colleagues. Obviously, I made my excuses and declined.
It’s been over two decades since I got harassed via message by my old BBC boss. But with the mediums where men can digitally contact women exploding, I have found myself the subject of these one-sided affairs carried out via their devices countless times since. And I am sure most of the men involved convinced themselves that it was entirely ‘consensual’.
I saw casual - and sometimes blatant - sexism at the highest levels on the show.
Take the guy I dated for a few months before we decided to just be friends. Our relationship remained (as far as I was aware) healthy and friendly for about a year. Until he returned to Australia and got into a new relationship. Then, late-night messages started appearing via Facebook messenger, telling me I was “the one who got away” and suggesting we share naked pictures. Which, of course, I never did. But it was disturbing that this man who I thought I knew, yet had never seen this side of, suddenly felt confident and justified harassing me with sleazy messages; now he was over 9,000 miles away and also seeing another woman.
“Many men have switched their harassment from physical to digital. Assuring themselves: ‘There’s no touching. I’m not cheating. I’m still a nice guy’”
There appeared to be a sea change in 2017 when women publicly called men out on harassment during the #MeToo movement. Around this time, many men I knew admitted it made them take a closer look at their behaviour towards women. But my own experience, plus that of Jenas and countless other sexting victims, suggests this self-awareness was short-lived. Many men have simply switched their harassment from verbal and physical to digital. Assuring themselves: “There’s no touching. I’m not cheating. I’m still a nice guy.”
Like the man I met five years after the #MeToo movement in 2022. He asked me out, then continued to send flirty messages every day for six weeks before we pinned down a date. But we only made it to the second drink before he admitted he was married. “It’s not like I’m breaking the law,” he said coldly, after I vocalised my disgust at his treatment of his wife, not to mention his waste of my time.
But I was as cross about the weeks of messages (a cowardly pastime to escape from his marriage, which I thought could be the start of a relationship) as the date itself. His tone-deaf response showed complete disrespect to his wife, reminiscent of Jermaine Jenas’ protest that sending suggestive texts wasn’t “illegal”.
It’s time we call these texts cheats out and stop men from using “sexting” as a loophole for inappropriate behaviour. We need to ensure that men who behave like Jermaine Jenas and my old BBC boss no longer hold the power to secretly harass women in the workplace. Is that too much to ask?
The facts are pretty bleak.
