Sunday Times 2
Maidens groped over in cricket’s dressing room
View(s):Confidential sec tells of hands-on Trumps at Sri Lanka Cricket
You would have thought it only happens in America. But behind closed doors at Lanka’s own Cricket Board, the art of the grope is not only locker room man talk but also office room bawdy action as well.
Last Wednesday, the gloves were off when a former confidential secretary of Sri Lanka Cricket digged the dirt on the squalid goings-on and flung it by the trowel on the public pitch. She spilled the beans on how some hands-on Cricket Board managers turned horny lechers during office hours; and indulged in a perverse proclivity many would have thought only USA’s randy presidential hopefuls and former White House presidents had special licence to practise with impunity either in the Oval Office or out.
TOP EX EXECUTIVE GAYATHRIE: Gives the lowdown on sexual molestation at SLC
Gayathrie Wickremasinghe, the former Confidential Secretary in the Cricket Board’s Marketing Division, gave the lowdown on the seedy environ within the Cricket Board office and described how officials and their henchmen had turned it into a bordello; where almost every female figure was deemed touchable, grabbable and available.
She told the internal disciplinary committee hearings held last week that some officials made sexual demands, some groped unabashedly, some touched casually, some gave the twice over umpteen times, some made suggestive lewd comments; and, if all that failed to elicit a willing response, some verbally abused the helpless, hapless female employee and reduced her to tears and scorn.
Donald Trump’s view of women were no different to that held by some cricket board’s top officials who considered every two legs in a skirt or a figure draped in a sari as fair game for a rough and tumble within the confines of the Board’s glamorous office at Maitland Place, Colombo 7. At least Trump did not molest his underlings but groped instead those not bound to him by any means. Unscrupulous Cricket Board officials, however, preyed upon young girls whose job depended on entertaining their perversions. And it had been going on for years.
The startling revelations were made by the former top female executive officer of the country’s most internationally recognised corporate body during a disciplinary inquiry held against her. Some of the charges against her, Gayathrie said, were brushing her hair, applying make-up and painting her nails in the office, talking too loudly on the phone and getting late to come to office. But according to her the real reason was her refusal to yield to their crude advances or submit to their groping. She claimed that the termination of her employment at Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) was mainly due to her refusal to co-operate with the sexual demands of some perverted officials.
“During the tenure of my service with SLC, I have faced harassments including sexual harassment and perversion by, certain personnel of SLC. I have been offered with club memberships in order to call for evening drinks,” Gayathrie said at the inquiry adding that “The individuals I have mentioned here are certain employees of SLC and certain members of the SLC. I do not want to divulge their names but I would do so when the necessity arises. Being an unmarried lady, I did not want to complain and tarnish my image, myself due to the reason of manipulation and finally publishing all bogus stories against the innocent parties. During the time I was working with tour organising I have faced sexual harassments and perversion from certain support staff individuals as well.”
“Some of the officials,” she says, “even bragged about the extra marital affairs they were having with other women.” But when she refused to give ear to their sexual boasts and spurned their lecherous advances, the passes stopped and the mudslinging began in earnest.
She claims, “Frustrated officials spread stories targeting my character. One wild story was that I had spent the night with a cricketer during a test match.” The story held that she had spent the night at a hotel in Galle with a young cricketer and that a senior cricket official had claimed that CCTV cameras had caught her emerging from his room. “They used the web media to propagate their lies,” the unmarried Gayathrie says, denying the report.
Gayathrie’s allegations of widespread sexual molestation at Sri Lanka Cricket go beyond her own individual case and must prompt the SLC’s Executive Committee to launch an independent inquiry to determine the truth of the accusations made and, if proven, to take immediate measures to stump out the cads in this gentlemen’s game.
Or else Sri Lanka Cricket, which proudly proclaims, on its website, to be ‘the stamp of authority on the local cricketing map under the mandate of Ministry of Sports, focused on upholding the cricketing heritage of the country and one of Lanka’s super brand names most known all over the world today,’ will come to be regarded as nothing more than a pervert-packed private bus during the evening office rush hour, where gropers notch maidens over in captive surroundings on their own turf behind the sunscreens.