“Five minutes before I went on the air, I suddenly had to come for an interview,” Hanne Troonbeeckx tells De Morgen. “I came to one of the big bosses of the channel. He said I didn’t look. “You’re too fat,” he said. ‘Do something about it.’ A few moments later I was already in front of the cameras. I was very young then and very insecure. When you get killed like that, it hits you hard.” Troonbeeckx eventually decided to leave himself and left for VT4. “But that experience hurt me a lot,” she says. “When I was still working for television, I couldn’t talk about it because it’s such a small world. I didn’t know if I would still get it.”
Marlène de Wouters opened up about her departure from VTM for the first time in 20 years in ‘Viva La Feta’ (Play4) and according to her it was a #MeToo story. “Basically, for years I’ve refused advances from a man in a position of power: asking me out to dinner on a Saturday night, phone calls that had nothing to do with work, barging into my box, hanging out at my desk while I sat there working, waiting for me late at night after work. Not wanting to accept the advances cost me my career.”