In 16 years as a stand-up comedian, Jen Grant says she’s never experienced anything like it.

“When it first happened, I felt blindsided,” Grant told the Star. “I was really surprised because it was so inappropriate for the environment.”

On May 13, Grant cut her 45-minute set short during an annual corporate awards ceremony for the Ontario Printing & Imaging Association (OPIA) after a man in the audience hurled vulgar, sexual comments at her.

In a blog post, Grant said the man, whom she guessed to be in his late 30s or early 40s, told her: “There’s a 51 per cent chance that my buddy here will have sex with you . . . and I will take the other 49 per cent.”

The comment came only three minutes after her performance began, she said. While she tried to shrug it off, the comments continued in a “rapey tone” into the set.

“Ohhh the things I would do to you,” Grant said the man later said.

“I thought, you can do this, just push through, ignore him. Then I went to speak again and I couldn’t because I had that cry type of voice. It’s like my body didn’t allow me to continue to be abused,” Grant, who is originally from Ottawa but lives in Toronto, recalled.

“I was trying to push through, but then I just started crying. I’ve never done that before on stage. It was humiliating.”

OPIA President Tracey Preston told the Star she only knew something was wrong when Grant put down the microphone and left the stage.

“I was at the back of the room. The heckler was at the front of the room, so the back of the room couldn’t hear his voice. In fact, I don’t think the majority of the room could hear his voice,” Preston said.

She said that she went to see Grant in the hallway after she left the stage. Seeing how upset she was, they agreed it would be best for Grant to leave, so she escorted her outside, Preston said.

OPIA Chair Dave Potje then took over the podium, she added. “He apologised for that outburst . . . It wasn’t in keeping with our normal conduct.”

The man was also asked to leave the event shortly thereafter.

“We didn’t know it was occurring at the time, or he would have been asked to leave immediately. The problem was we couldn’t, like I said, hear his responses. It’s my understanding that the people at the table were also telling him to knock it off, but he persisted,” Preston said.

The man, who works for TC Transcontinental, has been suspended with pay pending an ongoing investigation into the incident.

“That kind of event is not one that is not something in line with our values or with our culture, for sure,” Alain Morissette, chief of communications for Transcontinental, told the Star.

“We do think that it is important to take that situation very seriously, and we will act accordingly with the results of the investigation.”

While Grant said she didn’t want to weigh in on the consequences the man may face with his employer, she said that generally-speaking, she “wouldn’t want to work with somebody who treated somebody like that.”

Grant added that her experience wasn’t one of not having thick skin in the face of a heckler, but rather a case of sexual harassment in the workplace.

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She said it reminded her of what happened to City News reporter Shauna Hunt. Hunt confronted a group of men that shouted a vulgar phrase at her outside a Toronto FC soccer game earlier this month.

“This was an unusual case of plain-and-simple sexual harassment. That’s the way I felt — I felt like I was sexually harassed,” Grant said.

“I just wanted to have a good show and entertain some people, and that individual prevented me from being able to do that. And I think that’s a shame — I just don’t want it to affect my shows in the future just because I decided to talk about it.”