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OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
3:55 PM – Tuesday, December 10, 2024
More than 30 former and present employees have accused a married couple, who own one of the biggest LGBTQ+ media companies in the world, of sexual misconduct and sexual assault.
PinkNews‘ founder and CEO, Benjamin Cohen, and his husband, chief operations officer Anthony James, are accused of acting sexually inappropriate towards male staff members.
Cohen founded PinkNews in 2005, and it was a major player in the UK’s “fight for gay marriage equality.”
According to BBC, more than 30 current and former employees have stated that they believe their inappropriate actions were partly due to the company’s “heavy drinking culture.”
According to witnesses, Cohen invited a male staff member to come “back to his” place while slapping another male employee on the buttocks during a Christmas party. Additionally, James allegedly kissed and felt up a junior employee who was intoxicated after a business function.
It has also been alleged that certain female employees were asked to serve as the couple’s surrogates.
The BBC was told by Cohen’s and James’s representatives that “the accusations are untrue.”
According to the BBC, in their documentary “PinkNews: Behind Closed Doors,” which was made available for viewing on iPlayer on Tuesday, BBC employees spoke with 33 employees who worked for PinkNews between 2017 to 2024, with some being current employees.
Five former employees told the BBC that they witnessed James, a former general practitioner, kissing and molesting a junior employee outside a pub in central London where PinkNews employees had gathered after a work event.
They explained that the employee was “unable to consent” and was “too drunk to stand or talk.”
“Anthony was just forcing himself on somebody who wasn’t able to make that decision for themselves because of how intoxicated they were,” said one witness.
According to the BBC, a staff member eventually complained about the incident, which was shared with a number of PinkNews senior leadership team members.
At the pub after work, another former employee said that Cohen made him feel very uncomfortable.
“Ben was extremely drunk to the point he fell off his chair, and then asked me out of earshot of my other colleagues whether I wanted to go back to his … because Anthony, his husband, wasn’t there,” he told the UK outlet. “He said something along the lines of ‘Anthony is always getting with other men’ and the suggestion was we would do something sexually. I was extremely uncomfortable.”
Stephan Kyriacou, who was employed at PinkNews from 2019 to 2021, claimed that Cohen left him in “shock” after slapping his buttocks at a Christmas party.
The former employees claimed that the corporation had a robust drinking culture, that staff socials and away days frequently featured heavy drinking until the early hours of the morning, and that on “Prosecco Friday,” employees received free wine and chips in the office.
Additionally, a number of people reported that they felt “awkward and uncomfortable” when certain young, female staff members were targeted and asked to be surrogates for Cohen and James, as they both desired to be fathers.
At the age of 16, Cohen established the website JewishNet in 1998. In the early 2000s, he became involved in a well-publicized conflict with Apple for the domain name itunes.co.uk. He married James in 2018, and in 2020, he joined his husband at PinkNews. Prior to this, James served as a trustee at Mermaids, an organization that has come under fire for pushing transgender chest binders and puberty blockers for minors.
With commentary pieces supporting puberty blockers and articles using the derogatory term “terf,” which refers to people who believe that biological sex cannot be changed, a scientific fact, the journal has already taken a controversial stance on transgender issues.
“The fact you cannot separate the two is extremely problematic. Ben needs to be held to account. Until the day that happens, I don’t know if there’s a future for PinkNews,” declared an anonymous former staffer who reached out to the BBC.
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