Zentropa’s studio is housed in a former military camp outside Copenhagen and embodies militant transparency, with open doors and open-plan workspaces. Photograph by Theodor Barth / laif / Redux

The image of Denmark that travels around the world is that of a peaceful, progressive, liberal, educated country on the cutting edge of feminism. And that’s certainly how I viewed my home country during the years that I lived away from it. In the nineties, while pursuing a Ph.D. in New York, I would often boast to my fellow-students about Denmark’s admirable gender equality and its history of strong, independent women. It was one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote (1915), elect a woman minister (1924), legalize abortion (1973), and institute equal pay (1976). America seemed to lag hopelessly behind. Which is why, as my two daughters grew older, my British husband and I decided to move back to Europe and raise our girls in Denmark.

The homecoming also gave me the chance to write about another aspect of Denmark that made me proud: its famously edgy movie industry, spearheaded by the film company Zentropa. Its founder, the auteur-director Lars von Trier, was famed for co-creating the Dogme 95 school, which produced such breakout films as “Festen” and von Trier’s own “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark.” When I first visited Zentropa, I was captivated. The studio is housed in an isolated former military camp outside Copenhagen and embodies militant transparency, with open doors, open-plan workspaces, and tabloid headlines critical of Zentropa defiantly on display.

There’s a playful, cheeky defiance, too, in the have-a-splash outdoor swimming pool and the secondhand furniture: no fancy Danish design here, just the homely hygge of lit candles. Peter Aalbæk Jensen, Zentropa’s co-founder, was also a man of hygge. He’d crack jokes and make people feel special; he was famous but didn’t put on airs; he invited misfits—transsexuals, the young and psychologically damaged, and even convicted pedophiles—into his generous orbit. When I saw the man who calls himself Lillefar, or “Little Daddy,” he seemed at first benevolent, even vulnerable, as he took a nap in the company’s main room in the middle of the day, shoes off and feet up, glasses on the table, hands folded across his chest.

But, the more I visited Zentropa, the more I saw behavior that made me feel uncomfortable—both as a woman and as a Dane. The interview with von Trier went well: the world-famous director was amicable and down-to-earth. Aalbæk Jensen, on the other hand, refused to speak to me, on the grounds that he was sick of talking to the press; it would be more interesting, he suggested, to talk to Zentropa’s staff. Which is how I came to approach an intelligent young woman—I’ll call her Sarah—who had recently started work as a music consultant in Zentropa’s legal department. Sarah agreed to meet me regularly for my research.

To begin with, she reported impressions similar to my own: that Zentropa was an “eccentric” workplace, more like a “playground,” with no hierarchies, and a sense of “we’re all just anti-authoritarian, creative free-spirit anarchists.” But within weeks, suddenly and from nowhere, Sarah’s friendly boss, Aalbæk Jensen, turned into a bully, and the fun, lighthearted workspace became a daily torment. On a cold day in January, 2011, von Trier wandered into the legal department and casually proposed to Sarah that she should take off her clothes and get in the pool with him. Skinny-dipping in the pool is a Zentropa ritual. When you’ve stripped naked in front of Aalbæk Jensen and von Trier, you are accepted into the circle of the initiated. They’ve all (supposedly) done it. Some of Denmark’s leading film critics have done it, too, in Cannes, in a competition initiated by Aalbæk Jensen to win an interview with Nicole Kidman, who starred in von Trier’s “Dogville.” I have done it. I don’t feel good about it now, but at the time I wanted something badly: I wanted my story. But, that day in January, Sarah didn’t want to strip, and she said so. Aalbæk Jensen stepped in. “Either you jump into the pool with me,” he told her, “or I’ll have to fire you.”

When Sarah refused to comply, a familiar Aalbæk Jensen cry rang out through the hallways of Zentropa: “Fire that bitch!” A “bitch” (kælling) in Zentropa-lingo is a female employee who doesn’t follow the bosses’ orders. Another term that Aalbæk Jensen often uses to describe his female employees is “hooker” (or just “L,” for luder in Danish). On an excursion to Zentropa’s country retreat in May, 2012, Aalbæk Jensen referred to a female intern as “L”—until she jumped naked into the sea with him and was given back part of her real name: “A,” for Anna. Anna didn’t seem to find this in any way offensive, and the “Z” tattooed on her arm would give her a free pass to Zentropa’s parties at Cannes, as has been the practice for some of the interns in the company.

But back to Sarah. After Aalbæk Jensen fired her for not stripping for a swim with him, Sarah’s co-workers—mostly lawyers—tried to calm her down, explaining that it was just part of Zentropa’s shtick: she wasn’t fired fired, just “fired.” The invitation to strip was a good thing: it meant that she was being “tested” by Aalbæk Jensen to see whether she would fit into the fabric of the Zentropa family. “Testing” is another Zentropa rite of passage that Aalbæk Jensen has developed especially for new Zentropa employees and interns, who are known as Småtter (nobodies). He will single out an intern—usually female—and isolate her from the rest of the group by verbally attacking, teasing, and provoking her.

Over the next couple of weeks, Aalbæk Jensen would torment Sarah publicly (“Didn’t you get fired? How come you’re still here?”), while backstage her co-workers would reassure her (“That’s just Peter—he’s just testing you”), until, one day, Jensen offered her a shot at redemption. If she could come up with “a creative solution to her problem,” he would reinstate her.

Her answer, the following day, was to buy a cream sponge cake and throw it in his face. But her “creative solution” to a problem not of her own making didn’t go down well with the suddenly less playful Aalbæk Jensen. The test was over—and she’d failed it. When her firing was confirmed, it was Anders Kjærhauge, who is now the C.E.O. of the company, who did the honors, on the grounds of “minor violence” (a fireable offense, according to Danish criminal law). When Kjærhauge was interviewed in Variety in November, his response to the allegations of sexual harassment at Zentropa made by nine women in the Danish broadsheet Politiken was “These are personal experiences and I am sad that this is how they feel, but this is not the Zentropa I know.”

Last month, Kjærhauge told The New Yorker in an e-mail that he disagreed with the allegations. He said that it is “extremely rare that people are skinny dipping in our pool,” and denied that Aalbæk Jensen “called his female employees ‘hooker,’ ” adding that “almost 80 % of our employees are strong, clever, and independent females, and they would never accept such a situation.” (Requests for comment directly from Aalbæk Jensen went unanswered.) Sarah, Kjærhauge said, “went away as the winner, so I cannot see the victim angle.” He went on, “We are sorry that some former female employees have considered certain episodes as harassment, and it has resulted in some reflections about our humor, ironic tone, and our spaciousness for odd behavior. . . . We will definitely work on being better to detect if employees are unhappy about their working environment.”

Back in 2013, when I told Sarah’s story and that of others in my book, “Zentropia,” the revelations about sexualized intimidation were met with silence. Neither von Trier, Aalbæk Jensen, nor Zentropa commented publicly on what I’d reported. Even more surprisingly, no journalists whom I know of asked them to. For two decades, the Danish media had focussed on how von Trier’s indie powerhouse revolutionized Danish film and made it a global brand. Nobody seemed interested in stories that might undermine that image at home or abroad.