Dawn Elrick set up an Instagram account for women to share their stories of workplace abuse and bullying in TV and film – and she has been inundated
Dawn Elrick had only been working as a runner in the TV industry for a few months when two male assistant producers told her they’d like to spit roast her. She was 22. She didn’t know what spit roasting meant so, that evening, she Googled it. “When I realised what they had said,” says Elrick, who is now 43, and works as a producer in Glasgow, “I felt so horrible.” She dreaded having to go back to work the next day.
A few years later, Elrick was working on an entertainment show. A presenter would pull her in for bear hugs, grabbing her buttocks as he did. At the wrap party, he cornered her. “He said that he wanted to come on my face,” Elrick remembers. She did not feel that she could complain to her supervisors. “It was such a busy production,” she says. “Everyone was trying so hard to get through it … No one had the space to deal with it.”
