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Amanda Pepe was 20 and working as a TV journalist in Broken Hill when Don Burke arrived in town.
Key points:
- Amanda Pepe says she resigned from her job to take up a role on Don Burke's program in Sydney
- When she arrived she says Burke picked her up personally from the airport to take her to the hotel and she was greeted with a rose on the passenger seat
- Ms Pepe said Burke's "intent was very clear he expected to have sex" saying: "he more or less tried to guilt me into it"
It was the late 1980s and Burke was one of the biggest stars on Australian TV.
He was in the rural New South Wales town to film stories on artist Pro Hart, and Ms Pepe was assigned to cover his visit.
"He suggested that my talent was wasted up there and that I should come to Sydney and take up a role in a new upcoming program, and he would help me with that," Ms Pepe told 7.30.
She resigned from her job, packed up her house and booked a flight to Sydney.
"I arrived in Sydney expecting to be met by a representative but I was met personally by Don Burke at the airport, and I suppose that's when I first realised maybe I'd misunderstood this situation," she said.
"When I opened the passenger side door there was a rose on the seat and then I really knew I was not imagining things.
"I think I realised the career offer was a fantasy almost immediately after I saw the rose on the seat."
Ms Pepe said Burke took her straight to a hotel and carried her luggage to her room.
"The conversation was very sexually charged and all of his conversation for the entire time we were together was talking about his sexual exploits, other people he'd slept with, how they'd reacted," she said.
"The intent was very clear that he expected to have sex, that he'd paid for the room, that I more or less owed it to him, and it was very uncomfortable.
"I think he more or less tried to guilt me into it. 'Well, we've got this far, why wouldn't you finish it off?'
"To this day I'm glad I didn't go through with it.
"He left me at the hotel and I never saw or spoke to him again."
Burke has denied all allegations of indecent assault and sexual harassment.
"I'm not that man at all," he told A Current Affair last night.
"A number of the claims were … some of these things are despicable."
He said he had "made mistakes in his life" and said his colleagues may have had the view he "wasn't a nice person".
'It never even occurred to me to report him'
Ms Pepe said the incident changed her, stripping her of her confidence.
"I felt like I'd been really naive and stupid and judged myself very harshly on that front, and felt that no good journalist would have been that dumb, so therefore I clearly wasn't good enough and I should probably withdraw and do something else," she said.
"It never even occurred to me to report him, and I think that just speaks to the culture at the time, which is so sad.
"Hopefully these days someone going through this experience might feel able to tell someone in the company. I didn't do that."
She felt sick when she read the news stories about Burke.
"I think that's when I realised it was time to stop protecting myself, which is basically what I've been doing all these years, and speak out in the hope that it could make a difference," Ms Pepe said.
"There are still plenty out there who use the same modus operandi and they're still doing it and there are lots of 20-year-olds coming out of uni with the same blind faith that I had — that people want to help them and they really are going to give them a leg-up and get them started on their career, and it's just not true.
"All they want is to further their own ends.
"I wish I could sit here and say that I think that era is dead, and at 50 years of age I thought I would be saying that era is dead.
"But it's not, and I feel responsible for that.
"That's why it's been a pretty tough 24 hours.
"I probably could have done something a bit sooner."
TV journalist Tracy Spicer said Ms Pepe's story is "absolutely horrific".
"It speaks to that power imbalance. I've spoken to so many women who've felt that somehow they had to go along with this behaviour or otherwise they wouldn't get a job in the industry, and that's a huge price to pay," she said.
Ms Spicer said hundreds of women have come forward since last night's 7.30 story.
"Many of them haven't told anyone before they told us because they felt a misplaced sense of shame," she said.
"With regards to Don Burke the stories are very, very similar. Women were terrified of him.
"There's been a conspiracy of silence among people in the industry for many reasons.
"One is that this behaviour became normalised, particularly in the 80s and 90s.
"And people just thought that's the way it is, we can't do anything about it."
Ms Pepe's story emerged as children's author Jackie French, who once wrote a statement supporting Burke over sexual harassment allegations, backtracked and said he is not the man she once knew.
'He asked if I would lick that and I was gobsmacked'
It is not only women coming forward with stories about Burke.
Steve (not his real name) worked as a freelance sound recordist on Burke's Backyard in the 1990s and said he was bullied by Burke on a number of occasions.
"When we were on the road he played a lot of mind games with people, especially crew, or new crew. He would belittle you," Steve said.
"He would also belittle women by asking you horrid questions that I'd never heard before in the workplace.
"He would pick out some female and he'd say, 'Would you f*** that, mate?'
"I've never been put in that situation before in the workplace, especially by an employer, and I was dumbfounded."
Steve said there was one incident that left him feeling particularly humiliated.
He said they were filming on Burke's Sydney property when Burke noticed there was faeces on the bottom of his dog.
"He asked me if I would lick that and I was gobsmacked, but he went on for 10 minutes offering me increments of $10,000 at a time and up to $100,000," Steve said.
"I had to figure out a way to stop it and I said it would have to be US dollars, and he said to everyone, 'This guy would lick my dog's arse.'
"That was just so humiliating. It showed the sort of man he was to me."
Steve said he originally thought working on Burke's Backyard would be a great gig, especially because he loved gardening.
But he was quickly disappointed.
"I found it one of the worst workplace situations I could have ever been in, due to his ego, grinding you down, his treatment of people in general, not just women," Steve said.
"One of the major reasons for me coming out to talk about this is because we haven't heard anything but the women's stories, and just giving you a male's version of it shows you that apart from being a misogynist, he was quite an egotistical narcissist as well.
"And he couldn't help but use that against the people who worked for him."
Topics: community-and-society, arts-and-entertainment, television, television-broadcasting, information-and-communication, broadcasting, women, australia
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