Middleton’s bodyguard tangled in ‘racist and sexist abuse case’

LONDON - Kate Middleton’s personal police bodyguard was involved in a long-running campaign of racial and sexual harassment of a black policewoman, reveals the victim.

In legal papers lodged at an employment tribunal in 2003, Joy Hendricks named Ieuan Jones, now a detective sergeant and one of Middleton’s armed protection officers, as being one of the senior officers responsible for a Territorial Support Group (TSG) team, which subjected her to abuse and harassment.

The case was settled out of court in 2004 after the Metropolitan police pay 300,000 pounds to Hendricks to compensate for what she claimed was “five years of systematic victimization” during her time in the Met’s TSG.

Hendricks said that a team of officers destroyed her through racist and sexist abuse.

She has not been able to work since 1999, when she was forced to leave the Met because of stress caused by the alleged harassment.

She said she was bullied in front of members of the public and in private, in front of colleagues, and laughed at “when the abuse reduced me to tears”.

“How would Kate Middleton feel if she knew that one of the three officers responsible for her wellbeing, with whom she has a very close relationship and on whom she needs to rely every single day, had been involved?” the Guardian quoted Hendricks as saying.

“The Met refused to investigate my accusations but they can’t say they don’t know about them because I made the allegations on the record and submitted them to the employment tribunal.

“I find it hard to understand how an individual with these unresolved allegations hanging over his head - and they will continue to hang over his head until the Met agrees to the investigation I’ve been pushing for all these years - has been promoted to a position of trust around our future queen,” she said.

Hendricks became a Met officer in 1987. She found herself working under Jones during her first year at the TSG.

“He was a senior officer. He had the power and responsibility to stop the harassment, which was relentless and increasingly vicious,” she said.

None of the officers accused by Hendricks were disciplined or investigated because although the Met agreed to the payout, they refused to admit liability.

But documents lodged with the employment tribunal in 2003 contain allegations that Jones was involved in and present at a number of specific instances of harassment, including attaching a “learner” sticker to the back of Hendricks’s coat during a raid on an illegal rave party.

He was also accused of not letting Hendricks get into a people carrier transporting the rest of the TSG team, by repeatedly driving off whenever she tried to step in.

Buckingham Palace has refused to comment. (ANI)