Bosses of world’s largest LGBT news site PinkNews accused of sexual misconduct

Many of the former employees said staff socials or awaydays often involved drinking until the early hours of the morning and that "Prosecco Friday" - where staff would be given free wine and crisps - was introduced in the office in an effort to boost staff morale.

Another former staff member we are calling Damian said he personally experienced inappropriate behaviour from Mr Cohen during an evening at the pub after work.

"Ben was extremely drunk to the point he fell off his chair, and then asked me out of earshot of my other colleagues whether I wanted to go back to his […] because Anthony his husband wasn’t there," Damian said.

"He said something along the lines of 'Anthony is always getting with other men' and the suggestion was we would do something sexually. I was extremely uncomfortable."

Damian said after that night, he avoided being alone with Mr Cohen for the rest of his time at PinkNews.

"I never heard about it again, no apology," he said. "It put me on alert because it made me realise it was a boundary he thought he could cross."

Stephan Kyriacou, who worked at PinkNews between 2019 and 2021, said the job had started as a "dream come true" where he did not have to "hide who I was or pretend", but the dream was soon "shattered".

During a Christmas party, Mr Kyriacou said, Mr Cohen had slapped him on the bottom in front of everyone else.

"I just shut down for a minute. I didn’t know what to say. I was in shock. I remember turning to my friends and saying, 'What the hell just happened?'"

Mr Kyriacou said he no longer felt comfortable enough to be alone around his boss.

He said: "That just made me completely avoid him. I don’t remember ever speaking to him one-on-one after that."

Other staff also voiced their concerns about Mr Cohen, Mr Kyriacou said, with several messages in a group chat describing him as a "creep" and staff saying they did not feel comfortable around him.

"None of us really felt like we could complain because we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. Ben is very well-known and we didn’t know whether he was going to badmouth us to people," Mr Kyriacou said.

Staff have told us they were shouted at and belittled by Mr Cohen, and that there was a "toxic" culture at the company.

"He can be quite brutal in the way he speaks to you," said Damian. "When things go wrong he’d come down on you like a tonne of bricks and so you were just in this constant state of emotional flux.

"He put extreme pressures on me to the point I would go home and cry. It caused issues in my own personal relationship with my partner, and then [Benjamin] would love-bomb me and I would think everything was alright."

Cai Wilshaw, former head of external affairs at PinkNews, said: "You had this sort of dark cloud in the office sometimes when Ben was there, that made it really difficult to actually enjoy working there.

"We worked together quite well, but it is clear that he is a very, very difficult character, and sometimes overly so in a way that really impacted people who worked with him."

Some staff members also said they had witnessed what they called "misogynistic" behaviour.

Several people said that on occasions young, female members of staff had been asked to act as a surrogate for Mr Cohen and Dr James.

They say that often the request was delivered as a joke, but that it had made people feel "awkward and uncomfortable".

One anonymous staff member called it "creepy and sleazy", while another called it "part and parcel" of how "misogynistic" PinkNews was.