Joanna Page's Taxi Hostage Story: What Happened and Why She Stayed Silent
Let's skip the preamble. The part of Joanna Page’s story that really gets under my skin isn't the groping. It’s not even the director waltzing into her dressing room while she’s half-naked. It’s the warning.
Before the unnamed TV host even got a chance to lay a hand on her, a producer pulled her aside. A heads-up. The guy is "very handsy with the women," they said. "Be prepared."
Think about that for a second. That isn't a warning. A warning is "don't touch the stove, it's hot." A warning is "there's a sniper on that roof." This was a mission briefing. It was an instruction manual for navigating a known workplace hazard, like telling a new factory worker which machine is likely to take their finger off if they're not careful. The message wasn't "we'll protect you." The message was "this is going to happen, so figure out how to deal with it."
And deal with it she did. When the hand arrived, she knocked it away and made a joke. "God, I feel like I'm in Bristol Zoo." A perfect, light-hearted deflection. A little chuckle to smooth over the fact that she was just sexually assaulted on camera. She had to be the court jester and the HR department all at once, because God forbid she "make a fuss."
She said she didn't report it because she was a "people pleaser." No, 'people pleaser' is what you call your aunt who brings one too many casseroles to Thanksgiving. This is a hostage negotiator. This is a young actress trying to build a career in an industry where the gatekeepers have all the power, and she knew—instinctively, because the producer’s "warning" made it crystal clear—that the guy with the wandering hands was more valuable than she was. Making a fuss wouldn't get him fired. It would get her labeled "difficult."
It’s the same energy as every useless corporate HR seminar I’ve ever been forced to sit through. You know the ones. Where they spend an hour with a PowerPoint telling you not to be a monster, not because being a monster is wrong, but because it could open the company up to a lawsuit. It’s all just liability management. The producer’s warning was liability management. They could say they "told her." It’s offcourse a complete abdication of responsibility, but it lets them sleep at night.
Your Safety Protocol vs. a Goddamn Curtain
The Curtain Call
The other incident she mentioned, with the director, is almost more insidious. It’s quieter. A "well-known director" comes into her dressing room while she's in her underwear. He's "overly tactile." There’s no big, dramatic grope to point to. It’s just... creepy. Uncomfortable. An invasion of space designed to remind her who's in charge.
So what does she do? She wraps a curtain around herself and politely continues the conversation until he leaves. A goddamn curtain. She literally had to use the set dressing as a shield. Again, she’s forced to manage the situation, to keep things polite, to not spook the powerful man who could make or break her next job. It's a seperate kind of exhaustion. The constant, low-level vigilance required just to exist in a room with these people.
Page seems to think things are getting better. She mentions intimacy co-ordinators and new safety measures. And look, I’m sure that helps. A checklist is better than no checklist. But then she says the quiet part out loud: harassment will continue because "there's too much opportunity for it to happen."
There it is. That's the whole game. It ain't about a few bad apples. It’s about the design of the orchard. It’s an industry built on intimate settings, massive power imbalances, and the desperate desire of thousands of people for one of a handful of jobs. An intimacy co-ordinator can choreograph a scene, but they can't sit in on a "private" meeting in a hotel room or stand guard outside a dressing room door 24/7. They can't fix the "opportunity."
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe a few new rules really can rewire decades of accepted behavior. But when the initial response to a known predator isn’t to fire him, but to tell his next potential victim to "be prepared," I have my doubts.
The most chilling part of her entire account is the kicker. She says that if she hadn't been cast in Gavin and Stacey, she would have been "done with the whole thing." Think about that. One lucky break, one hit show, and you get to have a career. Otherwise, you're just another actress who couldn't take a joke and quietly disappears after being chewed up by the machine—
This Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Let's be real. The story here isn't that a famous actress was harassed. The story is that the system told her it was coming, and that her job was to smile through it. The "warning" wasn't a failure of the system. It was the system working exactly as intended, providing cover for its assets and reminding the new hires what the price of admission is.
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