‘Sleep with me and I will make you a baroness,’ peer told woman
FOR Lord Lester’s alleged victim, the sexual harassment started the moment she climbed into his car.
The woman, a prominent campaigner now in her 50s and a mother of adult children, had been working with Lord Lester for several months and had attended a dinner with the peer and charities in the House of Lords.
Having missed her last train home, she accepted an invitation from the eminent QC to stay at his south London home. “I had no reason to be concerned about staying overnight, especially with his wife present and had by that time been working with him for a few months, and so I accepted his invitation,” she recalled in her complaint.
It was a decision she regretted immediately. “In the car on the way to his house, he repeatedly missed the gearstick with his hand and instead very firmly placed his hand on my right thigh. The first time it happened I thought it must’ve been an accident, but when it continued I realised it was not. I removed his hand and asked him to stop. He just smiled.
“I felt incredibly uncomfortable knowing that I was on the way to staying at his house. He continued to grope my thigh for the length of the journey, despite my protests.”
When she arrived at his £1.3million home, she was greeted by his wife, Lady Lester, who had made mugs of tea for the pair.
The victim continued: “We chatted, and his wife told me she would bring me a cup of tea to my room in the morning. Lord Lester then said he would show me to my bedroom for the night. He said it was not far from his bedroom, which he insisted on pointing out to me, saying he would not be far from me.
“This made me feel very uncomfortable, as his remarks and his earlier behaviour made me feel that he had other intentions notwithstanding my unequivocal rejection of his advances.”
The woman wedged a chair under the door handle. She phoned a friend, saying she “felt trapped in his house” and went to bed fully clothed.
The harassment continued the next morning after she went down to the kitchen. “At some point, I went over to place the crockery in the sink. It was
‘He repeatedly missed the gearstick with his hand and instead very firmly placed his hand on my right thigh’
then that he came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. I pushed him away. Again, he placed his arms around me and further up my body. I had to force myself away.
“He pursued me around the kitchen and I pleaded with him to stop.”
Lord Lester insisted on driving her to the station, where he told her he had “strong feelings for me”. The victim said she did not “feel the same way” and caught her train “feeling uncomfortable and violated by this behaviour”.
The woman spent the next days and weeks avoiding being alone with the peer, when she was helping contribute to drafting legislation. It was at a meeting in the House of Lords “not long af-
ter” that Lord Lester made his next advance after she went outside for a breath of fresh air.
Lord Lester followed her and said he had strong feelings for her. The woman continued: “He questioned whether I was concerned that he would not be able to have sex and told me that there were ‘things’ he could buy for this.
“I was shocked and did not respond. He went on to make other inappropriate sexual comments. I stood up and went to walk back inside. As we were approaching the House of Lords building, he pointed to it and said ‘do you see that building?’, to which I replied ‘yes’.
“He said, ‘if you sleep with me I will make you a baroness within a year’. He even spelt it out, putting my surname in, and asked me how that sounded.”
The victim said that if she were “ever to become a member of the House of Lords, it had to be purely on merit”.
After the woman said she would not sleep with him, Lord Lester warned “there would be other repercussions for me, which he did not specify”.
The woman continued: “He made a number of further inappropriate sexual comments to me, such as that he could see me becoming a demanding mistress. I was distressed and shocked by his behaviour.”
The following morning the woman contacted a district judge and a crown prosecutor to tell them what happened. Moments later Lord Lester sent her a text saying “you want to think about my proposal”.
The woman found she was no longer invited to meetings, leading her to believe that he “was now excluding me because I rejected his advance”.
The following year she was at an event where – knowing she would meet Lord Lester – she took a friend. Lord Lester said: “Oh, I see you’ve brought a chaperone with you.”
The final contact was “several years later” when Lord Lester emailed “out of the blue to my work email address, criticising me for campaigning for something that he did not agree with”.
She said: “The tone of the email made me feel as if I was being reprimanded and again he had the power to send me such an email.
“It felt worse because of how he had treated me in the past, which was harassment tantamount to bullying.”
Commenting on the allegations on Twitter, Lord Lester, 82, described the investigation as “flawed and unfair” and the allegations as “completely untrue”.