Coronation Street actor says she was sexually harassed during work on women's rights doc

‘It made me think, ‘well, did I encourage him?’

Coronation Street actor Nicola Thorp says she was sexually harassed by a male colleague while working on a documentary about women’s rights.

The former soap actor claims a man working on the documentary, which was never released, sent her numerous text messages about her attire during the production and revealed he wanted to have sex with her.

“A man in the public eye approached me to do a ­documentary about women’s rights and then, in the process, he told me how much he wanted to have sex with me,” she said of her colleague, whose name she did not disclose.

“He then started sending me photos of dresses and shoes he thought I’d look sexy in at three in the morning.”

The actor, who recalled the harassment in an interview with The Mirror, said the incident “really messed” her up.

She added: “It made me think, ‘well, did I encourage him? Was my worth as a potential presenter of a documentary only gauged by how much I flirted with him?’”

Thorp, who previously played character Pat Phelan’s long-lost daughter Nicola Rubinstein on Coronation Street, also detailed a time when she was harassed by a theatre director.

“He was such a creep and luckily he’s not working any more” she said.

“He just started messaging me at all times of the night telling me he had ­feelings for me, trying to coerce me into telling him that I had a crush on him. He started saying quite sordid things to me.

Nicola Thorp attends the Inside Soap Awards held at The Hippodrome on November 6, 2017 in London, England (Getty Images)

“He suggested to me that if I didn’t co-operate I would never work again. I told him very clearly I didn’t want to hear from him again. He had a wife and kids.”

Thorp also recalled an incident which saw her locked in a bathroom by a manager who told her he wouldn’t allow her out until she kissed him.

“I was only 19, but I laughed it off,” she said.

“Then I went home and he was ­probably none the wiser that he’d done anything wrong, he’d just gotten away with being abusive and coercive.”

Thorp’s comments come days before she will take part in Care International's #March4Women rally on Sunday, which will celebrate modern-day campaigners who have challenged the law to change the world.

Prior to her role on the British soap opera, Thorp publicly condemned employee outsourcing firm Portico for sending her home without pay from her receptionist job at financial services firm PwC after she refused to wear high heels.

In December 2015, Thorp arrived at a London-based PwC office to be told by a representative from Portico, which ran the office's reception desks, that she had to wear shoes with a "2in to 4in heel".

When she refused and highlighted that male colleagues were not asked to adhere to a similar dress code, she was dismissed.

As a result of the incident, Portico - which outsourced the then temporary worker to PwC - said it would allow all female colleagues to wear plain flat shoes or plain court shoes as they prefer “with immediate effect”.

Meanwhile, PwC stated that the dress code was "not a PwC policy" but that of third party Portico.

A spokesperson told the BBC: “PwC outsources its front of house and reception services to a third party supplier. We first became aware of this matter on 10 May, some five months after the issue arose."

In a statement a spokesperson added: "We are now reviewing our supplier uniform codes to ensure they are aligned with our own values."