Toby Young
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The reason I feel so much sympathy for Kohli is that I had a similar experience ten years ago. I was living in New York, working as a freelance journalist, and among the publications I was contributing to was Time Out NY. On one occasion, I was on my way out of a meeting with the travel editor when I stopped to chat to a female intern. She was an English girl I knew from back home and we had been out on a date the previous week. Our evening had consisted of attending a mind-numbingly boring piece of ‘experimental theatre’ and, in an ironic reference to the awfulness of our first date, I thought it would be funny to invite her on an even more tedious second date. ‘Are you busy next Saturday? The same company are giving a follow-up performance, only this time they’re doing the complete works of Shakespeare…’
Okay, it wasn’t exactly Woody Allen, but she was kind enough to laugh, so I carried on in the same vein, making each invitation sound less and less appealing: ‘Boutros Boutros-Ghali is giving a lecture on the sub-Saharan food crisis…’ In order to make the gag work I delivered these invitations completely deadpan and, to the casual observer, it might have seemed as if I was in deadly earnest. But such an observer would need to be pretty humourless not to realise I was joking, since the girl in question clearly found it quite funny. Unfortunately, just such a person was eavesdropping on our conversation. Her title, if I remember correctly, was the ‘sexual harassment ombudswoman’ and after witnessing my little performance she marched straight into the editor’s office and reported me. In her eyes, I was guilty of ‘repeated requests for dates’, one of the activities that was forbidden by the company’s sexual harassment policy. The editor — who also had a sense-of-humour bypass — duly investigated this ‘incident’. My colleague in the travel department was hauled in and questioned, as were all the members of staff I had worked with on the magazine, in an attempt to discover the full extent of my ‘sexist’ behaviour.
Eventually, the investigation ran aground when the English girl was asked if she would like to lodge a formal complaint. To her credit, she told the editor she was being ridiculous and that the two of us had just been having a laugh. Needless to say, she was not offered a full-time job when her internship expired.
I thought my name had been cleared, but the next time I pitched a story to the travel editor she told me she couldn’t possibly commission an article from me. ‘You’re on the blacklist,’ she said. Luckily, it didn’t affect the attitude of editors on other publications — I was blacklisted by them for different reasons — but it put a small dent in my livelihood nevertheless. In contemporary New York, behaving in a way that can be construed as sexist, even if it’s completely innocent, can seriously damage your career — and judging from the treatment meted out to Hardeep Singh Kohli, that same McCarthyite principle has crossed the Atlantic.
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