By Ila Ananya
Apparently it can be completely ‘unintentional’ for a man to touch a woman’s breast and push her away.
In a video that’s gone viral, BBC presenter Ben Brown can be seen doing just this in the middle of a live interview with BBC’s assistant political editor Norman Smith. The two were discussing the Labour Party’s election manifesto, when an unidentified woman stepped between them and gave a thumbs up as she looked into the camera.
Of course Brown thought the right thing to do was to touch her breast and push her away, and later tweeted, “Unfortunate disruption of broadcast in Bradford — just tried to minimize disruption but v tricky live on air — completely unintentional.” Hello, please, it can’t be that tricky also, just to pause a moment and see what you’re doing.
But anybody watching the video can see how his move appears to be deliberate: Brown looks directly at the woman before coolly making her move away with his hand on her right breast.
For some reason though, everyone seems to have reported that the woman slapped Brown (she looks stunned and hits his shoulder) after he touched her “by accident”. Huffington Post UK’s headline is ‘BBC’s Ben Brown slapped after accidentally pushing woman away by the breast,’ RT went with ‘BBC reporter slapped after accidentally groping woman who interrupted live interview’, and Guardian said, ‘BBC presenter slapped by woman after appearing to touch her breast.’
Excuse, but Brown isn’t “appearing” to touch her, he really did. We don’t understand why all the focus is on Brown being “slapped” as though paapam, poor man. Evening Standard even added a bit about how the woman was interrupting the live interview as though that is the point of everything that happened, and not the fact that she was groped.
This is all just another way of protecting men who think they can do as they please, BBC has even said that no action will be taken against Brown because it was “clearly an accident.” Because it’s all so simple, na?