Some women’s utter shamelessness knows no bounds. One such woman is clearly Rani Abraham (41) who recently revealed some private emails of Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, to the media. Not behaviour you’re expect from a ‘personal assistant’, to say the least, and presumably in breach of her contract terms.
When I started working in the business sector in 1979, a few years after Ms Abraham was born, these women were called ‘secretaries’. Ten years later they were increasingly often called ‘personal assistants’ and were being paid more for doing less, as the advent of computers had made their workload significantly less onerous.
Piling insult upon injury, Ms Abraham is now going to sue the Premier League. A Daily Mail article on the matter. An extract:
The Premier League insists she was specifically told not to look at his private emails. In legal papers, Miss Abraham brands the Premier League an ‘institutionally sexist old boys’ club’ and the Football Association ‘not fit for purpose’. She alleges that the FA chose to ‘cover up’ the scandal when it should have charged Scudamore with bringing the game into disrepute.
Her solicitor Lawrence Davies, of law firm Equal Justice, revealed she is seeking compensation for lost earnings and hurt feelings as well as aggravated and punitive damages. Miss Abraham brands the Premier League an ‘institutionally sexist old boys’ club’.
Lawrence Davies said: ‘The compensation she is seeking is £150,000 in total – a tiny fraction of the Premier League’s £3 billion annual revenue.’ Awards of punitive damages by tribunals are virtually unheard of in this country.
Mr Davies said: ‘There is no limit to the amount a tribunal can award in damages for sex discrimination. It is only a matter of time before a UK tribunal adopts the U.S. approach to punitive damages to kill discriminatory practices that still flourish here.’
So let me get this straight. She carried out an action which was highly unethical and presumably in breach of her contract – but let’s not forget that women are generally above the law – then her solicitor seeks £150,000 compensation on the grounds that the sum is… er… ‘a tiny fraction of the Premier League’s £3 billion annual revenue.’ Oh, well, that’s all right then…
I would hope the Premier League would sue this damnable woman for breach of contract – but of course they won’t. I hope she loses her case, has to pay legal costs, never again finds employment, and fails to find a man stupid enough to maintain her. And I hope any men seeking to employ PAs in future make every effort to employ male PAs. With four out of seven unemployed people in the UK being men, many of them IT-literate, it shouldn’t prove a big challenge. Many of these men would surely be delighted to earn £40,000 for doing cushy office-based jobs.