A cleaner’s account describes encounters, alleged pressure, and fear of losing employment inside Trinidad’s state broadcaster. She went to work to clean an office. What followed, according to her account in an internal TTT Limited investigation, left her anxious about the one thing she could not afford to lose: her job.
The complaint was formally brought to the office of the chief executive officer on Friday, April 4, 2025. Eleven days later, an investigative panel had produced a preliminary report on allegations of workplace sexual harassment and unprofessional conduct. Its pages describe a conflict not over television ratings or news coverage, but over what happened when a woman assigned to clean offices encountered a male employee whose role, according to the report, began on January 2 that year.
The account is specific. The complainant told investigators that from the latter half of February she began feeling uncomfortable around the employee. She alleged he watched her while she cleaned, sometimes with a smirk, and repeatedly told her he liked watching her clean his office. She said he preferred her to use a vacuum rather than a broom because the vacuum took longer and required her to bend.
At another point, she alleged, he scattered peanuts from a bag and called her back to clean the floor less than 45 minutes after she had already cleaned the room.
Those details matter because the issue is not whether an office needed cleaning. It is whether routine cleaning duties, controlled by workplace hierarchies, became opportunities for unwelcome attention. On page 2, the panel summarised the central complaint: requests for hugs, a desire to watch her clean and inquiries about her whereabouts allegedly left her feeling “fearful and uncomfortable in the workplace.” The words are from the report’s description of the allegations, not an independent finding of wrongdoing.
The woman told the panel she had refused or brushed off requests for hugs, sometimes responding with a dismissive “steups”. She said the employee asked co-workers where she was and entered conversations when she was nearby. She described feeling as though she was being stalked.
Her account also included a more serious concern: that after she rebuffed him, he referred on approximately three occasions to having been hired by the Board and threatened to complain to her supervisor about her attitude or behaviour. That claim is disputed, and the report pages supplied do not establish it as a proven fact.
The flashpoint came on April 4. The complainant said she was reluctant to clean the employee’s office alone and asked for him to step outside. She told the panel he later entered and slammed the door behind her. She reported the incident to her department, setting the complaint in motion.
The report records that, when the panel met her at Rituals in Maraval on April 8, she was stressed and “worried about keeping her job.” Investigators repeatedly reassured her that coming forward was the right decision.
There is an important distinction between this account and a verdict. The document is explicitly headed “Preliminary Report”; it records what people said, including allegations and denials. The supplied scan contains only its first 12 pages. Still, those pages reveal why this case reaches beyond a dispute between two employees.
For a cleaner who depends on the wages, refusing an uncomfortable request can seem less simple when she believes the person asking has influence over her working conditions.
A broadcaster exists to ask hard questions on behalf of the country. Here, the question sits inside the broadcaster itself: when a worker says she feared losing her job, how effectively did the institution protect her ability to speak?