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The women, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they did not report the harassment at the time because they believed the CBC would protect Ghomeshi, then the star of its flagship arts and culture show, Q.

One of the women was a producer who worked at the CBC for four years. She told the Post that, in the spring of 2009, Ghomeshi grabbed her shoulders and gave her an unsolicited massage from behind as she was emptying her recycling into the bins in the hallway outside the Q offices.

“I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders and he just started massaging me aggressively. I tried to wriggle away,” she said. “Jian told me, ‘You just need to relax, you’re too tense.’ It wasn’t collegial. It was unprompted, it was extended, I felt trapped in a corridor and I felt like I could never say anything about it.”

The woman said Ghomeshi’s inappropriate behaviour in the workplace continued and that it “was certainly not the only time I was the recipient of wholly unwanted massaging.”

The second former CBC employee, who worked there for six years including a stint on Q, told the Post that in the spring of 2014 Ghomeshi came up from behind her unsolicited and pressed himself into her during a meeting.

“He was standing basically against me,” she said. “At first, I thought I bumped into him, but afterwards a colleague told me he was slowly moving closer and closer to me.” Another employee at the meeting confirmed witnessing the behaviour.

The woman said Ghomeshi similarly came up behind her and pressed himself against her later in the spring at a company potluck.