It NRC Handelsblad has lifted the veil about the culture of fear that prevails among many women at Ajax. Sports reporters Fabian van der Poll and Danielle Pinedo, who have investigated the matter, tell in the podcast NRC Today about the sexist behavior of men that occurs on a large scale within the club.
Ajax announced on Sunday through a statement on the club channels that Marc Overmars would leave the club with immediate effect. The director of football affairs is said to have been guilty of transgressive behavior among women, making his position untenable. It NRC became aware in December about the abuses at Ajax. “My colleague Steven Persput received a tip,” says Van der Poll. “He couldn’t believe his ears and neither could I. That tip was emphatically about Overmars.”
Pinedo subsequently joined the investigation. The three initially struggled to get in touch with possible victims, the journalist said. “Ajax is known for keeping the shutters closed. That it not done is to talk. So it was very difficult to reach the women. We did that through LinkedIn to see who worked there. That was a very precarious process, it was not easy. But we succeeded by often emphasizing the social importance and that we would protect the women at all costs. I often heard the fear over the phone, that was quite heavy in that respect.”
Cesspool opens: Overmars fired more explicit content at women
It General Newspaper already revealed on Tuesday about the explicit content that Marc Overmars sent to women within Ajax.
As soon as contact with the women was established, Pinedo and her colleagues quickly discovered ‘a culture’ among the people of Amsterdam. “Women were often approached sexistically based on their appearance, on what they wore. We have the example of a drink where a woman was secretly photographed by a male colleague without her realizing it, and that photo was then viewed by a group men. Women were also not always taken seriously within the club.”
Van der Poll speaks of a ‘seepage dressing room culture’. “Everyone knows the jokes that are made there. Sometimes that is also the place for that. But that sometimes seeps through to other places in a company, so that the boundaries actually blur. You could say that Overmars, someone who has spent years in who has been in the dressing room, took that behavior with you. The women we spoke to said that you have to take such behavior into account when you work at Ajax. That is part of it even, then you have to have a double skin as a woman.”