A UN employee has accused a top official with the organization of grabbing her in a hotel elevator, forcibly kissing her and trying to drag her into his room during a 2015 conference, according to a new report.
Martina Brostrom, a policy adviser at UNAIDS, the UN’s global AIDS program, told CNN that she was offered a promotion if she accepted an apology from Luiz Loures, an assistant secretary-general.
“I was pleading with him, and I was just bracing with all that I could just to not leave the elevator,” Brostrom told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Loures has denied the allegations, telling CNN that he cooperated during a 14-month probe that concluded that her accusations were unsubstantiated.
According to the UN, Loures, who also was deputy executive director of UNAIDS, decided to leave the organizations at the end of his contract this week.
A spokesman for UNAIDS said the probe into Brostrom’s allegations followed “due process” and that she may appeal.
But Brostrom — one of three women to describe similar encounters with Loures — slammed the investigation as “deeply flawed.”
Another woman, Malayah Harper, told the network that Loures assaulted her in a very similar way at a hotel in 2014. A third woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described an assault a few years ago.
Several people close to UNAIDS head Michel Sidibé said they warned him about Loures during a period of at least three years.
CNN obtained audio of a staff meeting in late February at which Sidibé denied being warned.
He also said Loures was “courageous” to leave the UN and assailed employees who publicly alleged sexual harassment at the UN, saying “they don’t have [a] moral approach.”
By the time Brostrom arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, for the May 2015 conference, she said, she already knew to be careful of the lusty Loures.
He would “let his hand slide, you know, over your hair and sort of hold you behind the neck,” she said, recalling one sickening episode.
At the conference, she said, she and Loures got into the hotel elevator, where he lunged at her.
“I’m pushed towards the wall. He starts shoving his tongue into my mouth, trying to kiss me. And he is groping my body, including my breasts,” Brostrom told CNN.
“The elevator door opens and he tries to forcefully pull me out of the elevator — drag me towards the corridor of his room. He says, ‘Come, come in my room,’” she said.
She managed to hold him off, she said, running back into the elevator and to her own room.
Brostrom said she did not immediately file a formal complaint because she was afraid her allegations would be ignored — or that she could face retaliation.
A year later, she said, she notified Sidibé informally, a claim he has denied.
About a year and a half after the incident, she said, it became apparent to her that a reorganization could make her alleged assailant one of her direct supervisors.
She asked Sidibé to launch a probe, which he did.
Brostrom told CNN that she has been on paid sick leave more or less continuously since April 2017.
According to a medical evaluation she provided to the network, she is suffering from post-traumatic stress from a May 2015 incident.
“What has happened to me, how the situation has been mishandled — it mustn’t happen to any other woman,” she told Amanpour.