What a terrible cat in a poke RTL 4 has bought: it seems that Matthijs van Nieuwkerk is even more wrong than expected. “Sources say he grabbed someone by the throat.”
Unprecedented: almost everyone thought that the investigation report into the abuses at DWDD would become a sof, but there is so much sleaze and dirt in that the Media Park is currently one large crater. Will RTL boss Peter van der Vorst close his eyes to the new information about his brand new acquisition Matthijs van Nieuwkerk?
Physical violence
The DWDD horror turns out to have been even more horrifying than we already knew. According to the report of the Commission of Inquiry on Conduct and Culture of Broadcasters, there was ‘physical intimidation’ in the program and ‘the frightening effect of observing physical intimidation – even if it was not directed at themselves’.
According to the report, there was a culture of sexism, sometimes accompanied by physically unacceptable behavior. According to DWDD employees, the response to minor errors was ‘disproportionate’. “They said this involved a lot of verbal abuse, shouting, threatening, non-verbal intimidation, and in some cases physical violence.”
Grabbing by the throat
The report mentions ‘colleagues who have been grabbed by their throats’, but this is not put into concrete terms. It does de Volkskrant, who opened the DWDD cesspool, did: “Sources state that presenter Matthijs van Nieuwkerk would have grabbed an employee around his throat and pushed him against the wall. Is that right?”
Suzanne Kunzeler, the current boss of BNNVARA, responds: “We have heard about that incident. But I cannot go into detail about it, out of respect for the employee involved. (…) We presented this to him (Matthijs, ed.) before the publication of the Volkskrant. He emphatically denied this at the time.”
‘The perpetrator’
Huh?! Is Suzanne now saying that it was Matthijs who grabbed an employee by the throat? The broadcaster confirms it in the Sophie & Jeroen from yesterday, without mentioning his name. She’s talking about ‘the presenter’. Bee News hour Suzanne even calls him ‘the perpetrator’.
When Suzanne indicates that ‘in the cases of physical violence no persons other than one person have been mentioned’, the reporter asks for clarity: “And then it concerns Matthijs van Nieuwkerk again?” She then replied: “In this case it was about the presenter of the program.”
Sickened and deranged
Clearly. SP celebrity Lilian Marijnissen thinks it is disgusting. “People have been pushed against walls. I think that’s pretty messed up and crazy,” she says at the table Today Inside.
René van der Gijp thinks that Matthijs chose his victims very consciously. “You wouldn’t know who would grab you by the throat and put you against the wall, wouldn’t you? I had killed him. I would have really killed him, so he will know exactly who he is putting against the wall, of course.”
‘It’s silly’
According to René, it is ‘foolish’ and ‘craziness’. “Oh, man. We have said before, Wilfred: this man has simply started to believe in himself far too much. Most of it is about Matthijs. That man has simply started to believe in himself way too much and no one has pushed him back.”
Johan Derksen gave his standard opinion on this subject. On to Story boss Guido den Aantrekker. He also comments in Shownieuws about Matthijs’ alleged sexually transgressive behavior: “Perhaps Matthijs finds it very normal to put his arm around someone and perhaps also to touch their breasts.”
Matthijs denies
Matthijs denies that he would have grabbed someone by the throat and pushed them against the wall. “This is a bizarre accusation. Yes, I was sometimes verbally tough, but never physically. The fact that my former employer makes these kinds of wild accusations without any substantiation is shocking and I distance myself from it,” he told Nieuwsuur.
And in de Volkskrant: “Suzanne Kunzeler is talking about things that I do not recognize and to which I cannot respond. I have not been guilty of sexual or physical misconduct. The Van Rijn Committee did not establish this either. To read these accusations from my former employer today is truly astonishing.”
He concludes with annoyance: “Kunzeler proves himself to be a very unreliable (former) employer.”