The newspaper spoke to 32 witnesses, such as Aïcha Marghadi, who worked as an intern at the sports editor of the NOS. “Marghadi feels that people are doubting her,” reads the article published online Friday evening. “She wants a mentor, Tom Egbers. That is not going to happen: Egbers had already promised, but editor-in-chief Maarten Nooter is holding back. He didn’t think it was a good idea, and after insisting he said why not. “He said Tom had a hard time with pretty women. He said that Tom had had problems in the editorial office in the past. He didn’t go into details, but he was firm. This was not going to happen,” she says.
Marghadi was also the woman who called Jack van Gelder when he was in the bath, as the presenter himself announced on Thursday. “A remarkable story. She then asked if I wanted to be her mentor. And then I would have made the comment, “If you want to join me in the bath, fine.” Well, that’s a joke to me. Only that has hit her pretty hard, it turns out,” he said. Marghadi would also have discussed that incident with Nooter. “He looked at me and said: ‘Yes, that’s Jack’”, according to De Volkskrant.
Affair with intern
Egbers’ name comes up several times. At the end of 2009, for example, there was also a 22-year-old intern who made a report to the editor-in-chief. She had been approached by Egbers (48 at the time), who bombarded her with text messages, emails and phone calls. According to De Volkskrant, the woman, who continued to work at NOS Sport after her internship, eventually accepted Egbers’ seduction attempts. “They kissed a few times, and that was it, she reports the editor-in-chief.”
However, after the relationship ended, Egbers would have bullied the woman. In front of several colleagues, he called her “the axis of evil”, “the poison”, and “serpent”. He also gestured that he slit someone’s throat when she walked by, according to the newspaper. According to De Volkskrant, the editors-in-chief of the NOS also promised to talk to Egbers, but “nothing changed”.
Egbers: “Regret what happened at the time”
In a response to the article, Egbers says “he regrets what happened at the time”, and “he looks back on things differently”. According to the journalist, he himself reported the relationship to his employer, and now regrets it “because it caused grief in his private life”. “Looking back after all these years, the fact that she was in her twenties and I was in my forties is also very important to me.”
The editors-in-chief of NOS Sport did not want to respond substantively to the article or to specific questions from De Volkskrant about the stories of their witnesses. “As an employer, unfortunately, we can never make statements about (former) employees, their performance and any incidents between employees themselves due to privacy,” it sounds in a response. “The general picture that De Volkskrant paints is painful. Unfortunately, the sounds that emerge here have not reached all of us. So we care about that. This shows once again that there is real work to be done, and that what happened in the past must never happen again,” said General Manager Gerard Timmer.