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IRL spoke to Iris* (not her real name), a Malaysian woman who wanted to share her story of being sexually coerced by her CEO while working as an intern at a local Malaysian SME. Here is her story:
During the pandemic, I started working in this company, which I’ll call company X. It was a local SME based in Subang. I started work as an intern.
I was quite excited to work for this company, because it was billed as one of the most forward-thinking companies in KL.
It won a few awards for the games it designed, and it also had a strong female-led team, so I thought it would be a safe space away from the toxic communities that sometimes you could find in the games industry.
When I joined the team, I was greeted by Jonas, the CEO and Jennifer, the head of Creative, respectively.
Jonas was known for being a hard taskmaster, but who prided himself on “being able to bring out the best in people.” He was from the old school way of teaching, which was to bully juniors until they were too afraid of making the same mistake twice.
As a woman in a senior position in a games company, Jennifer was the sole reason I joined the company. I looked up to her as a shining example that things were changing, that women could become leaders too. I thought, if she could do it, then so could I.
The CEO had a mean streak and would bully others in the name of ‘improving them’
Like all bosses, Jonas would criticize the team when things didn’t go according to plan, but unlike other bosses, he would go one step further and turn his feedback into a personal attack.
One time, a male intern, Jun, was slow with answering messages on his Zoom. Since it was the MCO, all meetings were conducted over Zoom and Discord.
When Jonas confronted him, Jun tried to explain that his parents would often ask him to help out with the house chores, so he had to be away from the computer.
Jonas replied, “During work hours, your responsibility is to me, your boss. You know why you can’t get ahead in life? Because you don’t have the balls to stand up to your parents. This is why you’ll always be a coward, Jun.”
Although Jonas was in the right, calling Jun a coward was completely unnecessary. But that was the kind of boss Jonas was.
Still, it was my first experience with working culture, so I thought that was just par for the course, and I carried on learning all I could as an intern.
I told the CEO I write erotic fiction in my spare time
There was also another female intern who I wasn’t close to, Erica, who had left prematurely in the middle of her internship. I should have realised this was a red flag, but at the time, I didn’t think much of it.
The first few weeks during probation were okay, as I got used to the workload and communicating over video calls.
Then, during the third week I received a DM (direct message) from Jonas.
“So what do you do in your free time?”
An innocent question, or so I thought. I answered, “I write erotic literature.” He was intrigued, and we spoke a lot about the inner workings of the topic.
If I knew that revealing this about myself would have such dire consequences in the future, I never would have told him.
But this conversation led to not one, but many sexually-charged conversations in the ensuing months.
My CEO would dirty talk me while on Zoom meetings
Over the next few months, whenever we would have our meetings, Jonas would DM me privately through the discord channel and start a sexually-explicit conversation.
He would just say, without any forewarning: “I’m touching myself now. What are you up to?” Sometimes he’d do this while a meeting was taking place right in front of us!
As for me, I would give excuses like “I’m not in the mood” or “Not right now, I’m working,” hoping he’d take the hint.
But he would respond like this: “You mean no as in yes or really no no?” I felt I was pressured to say yes because he was first and foremost my boss, so I went along with it.
Each time we chatted over Discord privately, he would push his luck further, getting into more and more lurid detail about what he wanted to do with me.
One time, he even asked to see my breasts – during a work meeting! I was furious, but I kept my composure and gave him some excuse for not doing it.
I told him off later, saying we should not talk about this stuff during work hours. But deep down, I was feeling deeply violated and worried about how to end this.
I told Jennifer, the head of Creative, about what I was going through
I wanted to do something about this, but who could I report his conduct to? Jonas was the CEO of the company, and I was just a lowly intern. HR would take his side and believe him.
Finally, I reached out to Jennifer, the head of Creative and told her everything. I showed her screenshots of his conversations with me, and I asked her to get him to stop.
She said she would look into it, and I waited with bated breath for a week. During that time, Jonas continued to message me as if nothing had happened.
After a week of waiting anxiously, I couldn’t bear it any longer and spoke to her again. Jennifer was apologetic about it, but essentially told me there was nothing she could do.
To say I was disappointed to hear this was a huge understatement. How could she, a woman in a senior position, and basically on the same level as the CEO, turn a blind eye to this?
I swallowed my despair and continued working. My internship was only 4 months anyway, so I just needed to bear it for the sake of putting the experience into my resume.
After 3 more months of this, my internship finally ended, and I left the company with a sigh of relief.
A former intern reached out to talk about the CEO
After I left the company, Erica, the female intern who left prematurely, reached out to me over Discord.
She told me that Jonas had sexually harassed her too, and she had also told Jennifer about it.
But when Jennifer told her that nothing could be done, she gave up and tendered her resignation. That was the real reason she left.
Speaking to Erica, I felt a sense of relief knowing that I wasn’t the only one who went through this.
All this while, I thought it was my fault, that it was because I was an erotic writer, but hearing her side of the story, I realised that the problem wasn’t me – it was him. He did it because he was the CEO, and nobody could stop him even if they wanted to.
But I also felt regret – if only I was brave enough to leave like Erica did, I could have avoided 3 more months of anguish.
The worst part is, I lost all respect for Jennifer, the head of Creative. All this while, I thought this company was going to be more progressive and feminist than the other local games companies, but it ended up being one that protected a sexual predator.
What I learnt from this
What I went through nearly drove me to consider hurting myself and taking my own life. By the end of my internship, I was completely disillusioned about my chosen industry and wanted to leave it completely.
Still, I came out the other end with some bitter lessons that I will never forget.
1. Don’t be afraid to enforce your boundaries. I learned that I was really weak at enforcing my boundaries with ‘Jonas’. But after this, I will no longer allow men to treat me like a plaything, regardless of their status. I can choose to remove myself from the situation.
2. Choose mental health over job security. The fear of risking losing a job that was already putting my mental health at risk. Frankly, if I had left sooner, I may have risk being jobless but at least I save myself from brink of suicide.
3. Sexual coercion is still sexual assault. My boss would coerce me into saying ‘yes’, because he thought it would give him immunity from being labeled a sexual predator. But an unspoken ‘no’ doesn’t mean an unspoken ‘yes’. There was no clear discussion of consent, but in reality there was no consent.
4. Always follow your gut. Nobody really has the right to tell you if you’re weak or strong. Abuse is still abuse, and the thing with abusers is they will always try to manipulate you into thinking you’re weak just so you can keep taking their abuse.
My best friend once told me I have a tendency of “accepting and just tahan” just because I thought I could improve that way. But now I know: Abuse is never a way of improvement.
And I daresay, ‘what doesn’t kill you’ does not ‘make you stronger’. It only made me feel more broken because I knew I didn’t deserve any of it. If anything, I didn’t feel like a better person and I used to feel shame.
In the end, I realized the shame wasn’t mine – it was theirs for what they did.
Iris’ story highlights how, even in the #MeToo era, sexual assault is still very common, especially when there’s a power imbalance between the two involved parties.
How would you have dealt with this if you were her?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
Submit your story to hello@inreallife.my and you may be featured on In Real Life Malaysia!
For more stories like this, read: My Supervisor Sexually Harassed Me But HR Said “There’s No Proof”
My Supervisor Sexually Harassed Me But HR Said “There’s No Proof”
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