A female TV presenter has described how she was groped by an unknown assailant live on air during the Cologne carnival.

Esmeralda Labye, a reporter for Belgium’s RTBF, was doing a piece to camera when she was approached by two or three men, one of whom reached over her shoulder and grabbed her breast as she was broadcasting.

Labye wrote in a piece published on the station’s website that the “wretched and cowardly” men had been trying to get her attention as she was broadcasting, with one of them kissing her on the neck.

“Two or three men gathered behind me and attempted to make themselves the centre of my attention,” she said. “I was focusing on the broadcast, and then I felt a kiss on my neck.

“Almost immediately, a young German sings in my ear: ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? [Would you like to sleep with me tonight?]’. Then, I feel two hands rest on my shoulders. I see the person behind me mime an obscene gesture, a sexual practice that has no place on camera.”

As Labye tried to ignore the men, remaining in front of the camera as the presenter in the studio thanked her for the report, one of the group grabbed her. “It was at that moment that one of three men around me touched my chest. At that moment, I lost my temper. Knowing I had finished the broadcast, I turned around to tell them in English, ‘Do not touch me!’. The three didn’t seem to understand why I got angry, but they left without a word.”

Police in the west German city said on Saturday they had received more than twice the usual number of criminal complaints over sexual assaults during the first day of this year’s street carnival.

Police spokeswoman Dorothee Goebel said the rise was likely to be due to an increased public awareness and sensitivity to sexual assault after the outcry over a number of sex attacks which took place in the city on New Year’s Eve.



“The way people file criminal complaints has changed since New Year’s Eve, and that’s good,” she said, saying police had received 22 reports of varying degrees of seriousness, compared to 10 last year.