The woman behind Bridget Jones has claimed she was groped repeatedly while working for the BBC.
Helen Fielding, who penned the legendary 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary and spawned a multimedia franchise, joined the BBC as a researcher in 1979.
After leaving the broadcaster, she worked as a journalist, where the idea for the Bridget Jones character began as an unattributed column in The Independent.
From there, she became a novelist and penned several books, including three Bridget Jones novels—Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996, The Edge of Reason in 1999, and Mad About the Boy in 2013.
The books became a major film franchise, with Renée Zellweger in the titular role of Bridget, starring opposite love interests Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.
As a result, Helen, 67, is one of the biggest names in British publishing, but her latest story comes from when she was making her first steps in the industry.
She joined the BBC at the age of 21, when, as she told the Soho Summit, workplace sexual harassment went unpunished across several industries and trades.
‘I worked at the BBC when I was in my 20s, and you just got used to the fact that people would actually put their hand on your boob while they were talking to you about work,’ she said, via MailOnline.
Helen did not directly name any of her BBC colleagues in relation to her claims, nor did she directly accuse any other members of staff at the organisaiton.
Describing groping as an everyday occurrence, Helen added that women her age were expected to ‘put up with’ harassment from older male colleagues.
When contacted for comment, a BBC spokesperson told Metro in response to Helen’s claims: ‘We’re sorry to hear of these experiences. Attitudes and behaviours have changed significantly in the last 40 years and the BBC—like the rest of society—is very different place now to what it was then.’
Elsewhere, Helen also reflected on the industry as a whole and the era of Bridget Jones: ‘I first wrote Bridget pre-#MeToo—and when I look at that film now, I can’t believe that that stuff was going on,’ she said of the male characters in the novel who harass Bridget on a daily basis.
One such character, who makes it into the 2001 film adaptation, is Bridget’s leering boss, Mr. Fitzherbert, whom Bridget refers to as ‘Mr. T**spervert’.
Speaking about the movie industry today, Helen argued that, while they might be better disguised, the same attitudes remain from the 1970s and 1980s.
‘You still have to fight much harder as a woman, even a successful woman, and you get treated in ways that men would not be treated. And there’s no denying that it is still going on and it needs to change.’
Helen’s first novel was a 1994 satirical story titled Cause Celeb, which was based on the relationship between celebrities and refugees in a fictional East African country.
Aside from the Bridget Jones novels, she also penned the 2003 comic spy book Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, which tells the story of a woman following a man she believes to be a terrorist.
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