The young woman, an employee of the European parliament, was starstruck when one of its senior figures — a man of nearly 60 — entered a lift alone with her. But then he started touching her, whispering indecently in her ear.
“He was stroking my hair, then my neck, going down my back . . . I just froze, I was petrified,” she said.
“I told my colleague, who said I should report him, but in the end I didn’t . . . I was afraid of losing my job, of facing the embarrassment and ruining my career.”
The harasser, a married father of two, remains a prominent MEP. His victim is one of more than a dozen junior female staffers interviewed by this newspaper