by HAJAR NAILI
Given the likelihood of being harassed by any particular male source, one journalist says she cultivates many political contacts. “If you get upset with one of your sources, you can go to the others,” she told Women’s eNews. “You need to have a big Rolodex.”
Charlotte Gauthier didn’t immediately understand what a French elected official meant when, over lunch with other colleagues, he compared her to Janine Skorsky of the “House of Cards.”
Gauthier, in a recent phone interview, said she hadn’t watched the Netflix series. But at the end of the meeting a colleague told her that Skorsky is depicted as a political reporter “who sleeps around to get information.”
Gauthier, a reporter for the French national radio station Radio Classique, didn’t reveal the name of the lawmaker. She is one of 40 French female journalists who signed a May 4 open letter detailing the sexism and machismo they face covering politics that was published by the national newspaper Liberation.
In their letter, the journalists denounced inappropriate remarks and overtures by male elected officials and staffers.
“Ah, you are walking the streets, you are waiting for your client?” a lawmaker asks them as they are entering the Parliament, according to the letter. Or a minister whispers to one journalist who is wearing a dress, “it would be better if you had nothing underneath.” Or a political staffer inquires about a vacation by asking if she is “tanned everywhere.”
The journalists say they also receive regular text messages from elected officials, advisors and sometimes spokesmen. “A piece of information, a drink,” a message will say. At other times, repeated invitations for dinner, if possible, on a Saturday night. None of the men’s names are divulged either in the open letter or during interviews with Women’s eNews.
“I have the feeling that I am paying for something that I should not,” Nathalie Schuck told Women’s eNews, in a recent phone interview. “I think that a man does not face such a situation . . . We deal with it but it is not normal.”
Schuck has covered national politics for 15 years and spent four years, from 2008 through 2012, covering the presidential term of Nicolas Sarkozy. She works for the newspaper Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France.
She remembers being blackmailed by a male politician who insisted on taking her out for dinner. “He started by not answering my calls. But he would send me text messages punctuated with smileys saying ‘if you don’t go for dinner with me, I won’t give you anything,'” Schuck recalls.
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