Tracey Spicer - I Couldn't Let Them Get Away With It

In an explosive interview, newsreader Tracey Spicer bravely reveals to Michael Sheather the shocking sexism she experienced behind the TV cameras and her battles with death threats and a dangerous stalker.

- Michael Sheather

Tracey Spicer never expected that kind of Christmas greeting from a boss. Sashaying a little unsteadily across the room, one of her TV colleagues, a well-known man several rungs up the corporate ladder, sidled up to her in the midst of the station’s annual Christmas celebrations.

Tracey, at the time one of the most respected and popular faces on TV news, suddenly felt his warm, slightly clammy hand on her right buttock. The sensation, she recalls, was as shocking and sickening as it was unwelcome.

“He groped around for a second or two and said, ‘Looking good, Trace. Lost a bit of weight, eh?’,” recalls Tracey, 49. “I actually turned around to slap him, but realised it was one of my bosses. So, I just lowered my arm. I said, ‘Yeah, after my mother died, I didn’t feel like eating.’ He mumbled, ‘Nice arse’, and staggered off.”

It is hard to imagine a more confronting chapter in anyone’s career. “It was one of the most unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings I have ever experienced,” says Tracey.

“Let’s call that for what it is – that’s not sexual harassment. That is sexual assault. That has no place in any workplace, let alone in TV. It was a time when women were perceived as Barbie dolls, just there to read the news. Let us be blunt about it – we were Barbie dolls that could be played with in many ways by the male executives. I was always the good girl so I didn’t want to cause a fuss and I let [the incident] go. However, that didn’t make it palatable.

“And it wasn’t just some unwelcome touching. It went much deeper than that. It was a wallpaper of invisible misogyny. It was wallpaper because it was always around you, but in many ways, you became accustomed to it. When it is always there, you don’t always see it for what it really is. It is just there.”