Top United Nations official 'forced himself on me,' employee says

"A United Nations employee who says she was sexually assaulted by a top UN official has spoken publicly for the first time, alleging she was offered a promotion if she accepted an apology from the man and claiming that the organization failed to take her complaint seriously...

Martina Brostrom accused a UN assistant secretary general, Dr. Luiz Loures, of grabbing her in a hotel elevator, forcibly kissing her and trying to drag her to his room during a conference in 2015. He denies the allegations.

'I was pleading with him, and I was just bracing with all that I could just to not leave the elevator,' Brostrom, a policy advisor at UNAIDS, the United Nations' global AIDS program, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

Loures told CNN he co-operated fully with a 14-month investigation, which concluded that her claims were unsubstantiated. But Brostrom criticized the investigation as 'deeply flawed.'...

Brostrom is one of three women to describe similar encounters with Loures. Another, Malayah Harper, told CNN that Loures assaulted her in a strikingly similar way at a hotel in 2014. A third told CNN of an assault a few years ago; she spoke on condition of anonymity because of her current job.

Several people close to the head of UNAIDS, Michel Sidibé, say that they warned him about Loures over a period of at least three years...

The allegations point to a deep irony: While the UN's HIV/AIDS program has long promoted the empowerment of women as crucial to ending the epidemic, multiple activists and former UN employees tell CNN that the organization has also long protected an executive dogged by claims of sexual harassment..."