Wilfred Genee is a screaming idiot who was clearly out for revenge on Friday evening in Today Inside, says columnist Marcel van Roosmalen. “You just feel assaulted on that stool.”
Marcel van Roosmalen was violently attacked on Friday evening on the barstool of Today Inside. When he cracks a critical note about Angela de Jong, René van der Gijp hits the ball hard by stating that Marcel and his buddy Gijs Groenteman take themselves way too seriously. Marcel would have demanded the end of the name joke ‘Gijs Groenteboer’.
Greengrocer
What exactly is behind this? Marcel will return to this in detail this morning in his podcast Another Day. “Gijp started screaming out of nowhere in one go. Honestly, I didn’t know what it was about. It was about saying Groentboer and that I wouldn’t be able to handle that. I didn’t really get into it at all.”
The opinion maker said he was not given room to defend himself. “And at a certain moment I hear Wilfred say: ‘Yes, you said that, you said that!’ Then I had to dig into my memory about when the hell I said that. At least not that day.”
Grotesque nonsense
According to Marcel, the accusation is grotesque nonsense. “As if I take Wilfred Genee, a man with whom I hardly speak, aside to say: ‘Would you please stop calling Gijs Groenteman Gijs Groenteboer? We can’t handle that very well.’ I tried to say, “No, it’s not like that,” but he was completely absorbed. I just didn’t get into it.”
Now Marcel knows where it comes from. “The last time I was there, at the beginning of February, I was there with Sander Schimmelpenninck. He sat at the table and I sat at the bar. And that Sander Schimmelpenninck then completely absorbed them. Afterwards, Wilfred Genee was furious with everything and everyone and specifically with me.”
Sensitive joke
Wilfred hates Marcel, he says. “Since I was once a columnist in De Oranjezomer and devoted a few sentences to him while he was under fire in his private and business life. That was in the times of some riot. Bungalow houses had to be advertised and then I stood in a house and said: ‘This is the house of the Genee family.’”
He continues, “Well, that sentence has provoked a wrath of rage in Gene that I was out of my mind. He also has that column from that broadcast… It was never broadcast. And we’ve had a sort of hate relationship ever since. Every time he sees me it triggers something in him. After that broadcast, he was also yelling at me.”
Screaming Wilfred
What was Wilfred yelling then? “That I shouldn’t pretend that my children had been threatened. “You don’t take other people’s children into account at all!” And in that conversation, which was no longer a conversation because he started screaming, someone from the production said: ‘Otherwise, go and stand in the set, because it will be so embarrassing.’”
He continues: “In that exchange he said: ‘And we do have humor. For example, I really like that Eus calls Gijs Groenteman Gijs Groenteboer.’ Then I said: ‘I can imagine that you like a name joke, but to repeat it twenty times and repeat it all together, I don’t really think that’s the height of humor.’”
Jibe monkey
That is what happened, according to Marcel. “Apparently behind one of those bulkheads was René van der Gijp with a handful of nuts. Just like a monkey. And he heard that I didn’t like it so much when you are called Gijs Groenteboer. And that was made screamingly clear to me there at that talk show table.”
How was it after the broadcast? “After the broadcast, I was furious. I could have aired that in the broadcast, but I didn’t. I thought: I’m going to say something about it anyway. The editors all agreed with me. They said, ‘René might be grumpy, end of season, he might have had a few white wines.’”
Game master idiot
Marcel spoke to René. “He can’t handle that at all. Then you see those eyes turn away and then he says: ‘Well, that’s not good. That’s not good. He’s not good.’ He walks into the room where Wilfred is standing, I follow behind, and Wilfred puts his hands in the air like: ‘Did I do it again? Did I do it again?’”
Wilfred is an ‘idiot of a game master’, says Marcel. “It’s such a strange thing when you experience that. You just feel assaulted on that stool. You can’t go anywhere either. I should have thrown that book at them. I was completely done with it. I think Wilfred is the biggest idiot.”
‘Then you’re a l*l!’
Gijs, who emphasizes that he has no problem with it when people call him Groenteboer, but he doesn’t find it funny either, responds: “Wilfred’s hypocritical, high-pitched tone when he starts saying: ‘You said it was derogatory!’ … That he will support Van der Gijp as an innocent boy.”
Marcel: “Then you are an l*l. You think so, don’t you?”
As a regular VI guest, Marcel feels screwed. And other regular guests will notice that too, he says. “If you sit there for years like a kind of Job Knoester… Eventually you will become a Hans Kraay. One day you just get pushed away and then you don’t belong anymore.”
Another Day
Marcel’s story: