High heels, lipstick and how I finally got even with my sexist boss
WITh the benefit of hindsight, Lucia Pagliarone realises alarm bells should have rung when she learnt that the executive PA she was replacing at her new company had left her role after less than a month. ‘That should have told me something,’ she recalls. The one before that lasted less than six months. Another sign. But Lucia, 29, really wanted the job. her new role as PA to David Noakes, chief executive of a Guernsey-based pharmaceutical firm called Immuno Biotech, would be with a company marketing a drug it claimed could cure anything from cancer to autism.
Then there was the £40,000-a-year salary, a robust wage indicative of her new responsibilities.
Not, it seemed, that her new boss was too bothered about her qualifications — at least, not her professional ones. As Lucia would later discover when she came across her CV among a pile of papers, Noakes’s annotated remarks on her interview performance amounted to this: ‘Red lipstick, heels, good. Wearing a dress, excellent.’
It says something about her experience that by then, Lucia wasn’t even surprised: during her sixmonth employment with Immuno Biotech, she had both witnessed and been the recipient of sexist, personal remarks, as well as a series of angry outbursts from Noakes.
This ultimately led her to a tribunal for sex discrimination, where, last year, a panel awarded Lucia £10,500 damages, having been persuaded that Noakes’s sexist conduct had created a detrimental environment for women.
But, in an echo of the recent Mourinho case which was finally settled out of court this week after ten months of wrangling, Noakes refused to back down and appealed against the decision.
Last month, though, that appeal was dismissed, leaving Lucia free to speak out about her ordeal — one that will no doubt strike a chord with anyone who has been a victim of workplace bullying.
‘I know some people will think I was just after the money. But I wanted to say that you can’t treat people like this,’ she says.
‘Too much of this goes on in the workplace and it was important to stand up and be counted. ’
Nor is it the first time Immuno Biotech and Mr Noakes have found themselves in the news. Last year, both hit the headlines when it emerged that GcMaf, the drug they market, had been banned by the British authorities.
The product — derived from an essential protein in the body — had been hailed as a ‘wonder drug’ by Noakes. Alas, such claims are yet to be backed up by the authorities: the drug is currently unlicensed and last year the Medicines and healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MhRA) raided the company’s Cambridge laboratory. Its investigation is still progressing.
Lucia, who is still on Guernsey with her partner and young son, answered an advert placed by the company in spring 2014 for an executive PA.
All she saw was the opportunity for a fresh start.
Born and raised on Guernsey by her late Italian restaurateur father Piero and mother Pauline, a nanny, she had spent ten years working in the island’s private banking sector and was ready for a change.
‘GcMaf seemed an exciting new product that had the capacity to make a real difference to people’s lives,’ she recalls. ‘I had no PA experience but I’m good at organising people and very organised myself, so I sent off my CV.’
A few days later she was asked to attend an interview at a large rented house where Noakes was then living with his partner Lynn — also an Immuno Biotech employee — and which acted as the company hQ while they searched for professional premises.
The informal backdrop set the tone. ‘We were in the living room with people coming and going and David was doing most of the talking, pacing up and down,’ says Lucia.
‘I thought he was a crazy scientist type. he was reeling off medical data and I thought he was part of the medical team that had created the drug. It was only some weeks after I started working for him that I learnt he had no medical qualifications.’
Nonetheless, her initial impressions were favourable.
‘his passion for the product seemed genuine,’ she says. ‘I thought we had got on well.’
But it seemed Lucia was not the first choice.
‘I got an email saying they had gone for someone with more PA experience, but three weeks later I received another email asking if I’d take on the role after all, as it hadn’t worked out. Looking back, I should have realised that was fishy.’
So, after some to-ing and fro-ing over her contract, she started work at Immuno Biotech towards the end of August 2014.
From the start, it was not at all what she expected — though the company had by then secured offices in Guernsey’s capital, Saint Peter Port, for its 28-strong team, some of whom also worked at a laboratory in the UK.
‘It was shambolic,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even have a computer at first and ended up with a second-hand laptop. I also didn’t seem to be doing much of a PA job. Instead I was answering phones and seeing clients.’ Those clients were gravely ill people who wanted GcMaf at up to £400 a vial, anxious to test the claims — still trumpeted today on the company’s website — that it can ‘usually’ eradicate stage four cancer within a year, and help children ‘recover’ from autism. ‘Some were terminally ill and desperate. I felt so sorry for them, but at the same time I did believe in the drug,’ she says.
Noakes seemed quite reasonable at first, though it wasn’t long before Lucia saw another side to him. Female interviewees who arrived at the office were given short shrift if they were not what Noakes considered attractive.
‘On one occasion he said “I can’t hire her, as she’s ugly and overweight and I only employ beautiful women’.’ he said much the same thing about another woman: she was smart and well-dressed but afterwards David came out and said, “how are we supposed to hire her? Did you see what she was wearing and the size of her? We can’t have her on the front line representing our drug.” ’
‘I thought it was ironic, as we weren’t marketing Botox. We were dealing with very ill people who didn’t care what you looked like.’
While Noakes never said anything detrimental about Lucia’s appearance — on the contrary, he often emphasised how good-looking she was — nor did he ever compliment her on her professional skills.
‘It was all about how you looked. he even told me once that a colleague of his would “like me, only be polite to you if you were goodlooking”, as if this was something to be proud of.’
Clearly, for Noakes, it was. Sorting out some papers on his desk one day, Lucia found her CV, on which Noakes had written his assessment of her interview performance — one based entirely on how she looked.
‘I was stunned,’ she says. ‘I had worked hard for ten years and here I was reduced to a blonde with high heels.’
even so, Lucia says, on its own she might have been able to dismiss this. But Noakes had a more worrying side.
‘I lost count of his angry outbursts, which were almost always directed towards women,’ Lucia recalls. ‘It was not uncommon for one of the women to leave the office in tears after his tirades.
On more than one occasion he directed an outburst at her, too.
‘It would come out of nowhere,’ she says. ‘The problem was, he moved goalposts the whole time. Three weeks after I started, David called me into his office and said I wasn’t good enough to be a PA.
‘he made me feel I was terrible at my job, even though I’d been working long hours and taking work home. But it seemed to be an excuse to then flip out at me whenever he wanted to.’
There were mixed messages: at the start of December, Lucia found she had been given a £500 performance bonus — only to be summoned into Noakes’s office and remonstrated with for a minor administrative error that she insists wasn’t her fault.
‘It felt like he just needed an excuse to have a go at me.’
LUCIA then found she hadn’t been invited to the staff Christmas party. ‘It was incredibly hurtful. I’d done nothing wrong,’ she says. Shortly before Christmas, Noakes again called Lucia in to his glassfronted office.
‘The moment I stepped inside he blew his top,’ she recalls. ‘he told me everyone in the office hated me and that he’d wanted to sack me in the first week.
‘I was shaking with shock. Then he said he couldn’t stand the sight of me and swore at me to just get out of his office.’
In tears, Lucia started to pack up her desk as a colleague, Karen, went in to Noakes’s office to remonstrate with him. ‘I heard her tell him that he couldn’t treat people like that.
‘he then came out and apologised and suggested we go for a coffee and talk things over.’
Shaken, Lucia called her partner Chris, a carpenter, who suggested that he join them. ‘I was relieved, as I really didn’t want to be on my own with him,’ she recalls.
Over coffee, Lucia says, David apologised for his outburst but gave no reason for it.
‘he said he had handled it badly but all I could say was that I didn’t know what I had done wrong. he never really answered but said it would be too awkward for me to go back to the office, so he suggested I work back at his home.
‘It wasn’t ideal but I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I had bills to pay and Christmas was just around the corner.’
Lucia returned to work on January 4, 2015, reporting, as instructed, to David’s home.
‘Often he and his partner would still be in their dressing gowns when I arrived,’ she says. In any event, this new set-up clearly wasn’t going to last long: five days
later, Lucia heard that her days at the company were numbered. Peter, the finance director, handed her a termination of contract.
‘I asked him if he was going to give me a reason, to which his only reply was to tell me to let things calm down, then we could go for drink.’
Lucia decided otherwise: instead she went straight to a lawyer. ‘It was outrageous that I had lost a well-paid job through no fault of my own,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t just about me, either.’
With lawyers on Guernsey costing about £800 an hour, she knew it would not be cheap. ‘I had to opt for an advocate representative, who cost less but are still expensive,’ she says. ‘He warned me it could end up costing me money but I had to take a stand.’
Meanwhile, her confidence gone, Lucia remained out of work for months, finally rejoining the private banking sector before retraining as a holistic therapist.
She had no further contact with her former employer until November, when she saw him at her hearing.
‘He refused to look at me,’ she recalls. ‘His justification for sacking me was that several members of staff didn’t like me, which was just ludicrous.’
The tribunal panel agreed with her, ruling that Lucia was subjected to verbal harassment and had been the victim of sex discrimination, and awarding her £10,500.
Noakes’s remarks, they ruled, were inappropriate and constituted an ‘intimidating, hostile and humiliating working environment’.
Noakes’s appeal was subsequently dismissed.
Lucia’s victory remains bittersweet, however: with Immuno Biotech’s assets currently frozen on Guernsey after its import licence was revoked, Lucia has no idea when she will receive her award — and when she does, it will all be needed to cover her legal fees.
Yet she insists she has no regrets. ‘Harbouring feelings of bitterness and anger wasn’t going to get me anywhere,’ she says.
‘I just think it’s sad that people like David think it’s acceptable to behave the way they do.’