Surviving Simon Goldhill

We provide further testimony regarding Simon Goldhill. We thank our contributor for her honesty in recounting difficult details.

Unfortunately, ‘sharking’ remains commonplace in many UK universities, as the Warwick University rapechat scandal demonstrated in 2019. It’s still a problem in Cambridge undergraduate life, from colleges to sports clubs to societies, as Varsity recently noted. Even among academics, the 21 Group knows of a College where there is a competition among some senior male Fellows to sleep with the prettiest Junior Research Fellow.

For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this statement is intended to suggest that Simon Goldhill has committed any illegality.

“I arrived at Kings College Cambridge in 1977, a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. Having grown up with a violent parent, I was sure Kings would be a safer place. 

Simon was then starting his third year. He was a well-known figure, partly because he’d been involved in putting together the ‘blue book.’ This was a slim volume, given to every new student, which provided information about sex. I recall diagrams and phone numbers. I don’t think there was anything about consent.

Within twenty-four hours of our arrival, a female fresher was ‘going out’ with Simon. He and his mates had gone to the list by the mailboxes, and invited all first-year women with ‘interesting names’ to a party. 

This process is now called ‘sharking.’ Back then, it didn’t have a name.

My turn came in January. I had opted for an extra course in Latin, but my school hadn’t prepared me sufficiently. Admitting this might cause my tutor to look on me as inadequate. I mentioned my difficulties in Simon’s earshot, and he offered to come to my room and help.

He spent little time explaining grammar. I had expected some small talk. I had not anticipated that socialising would get so physical, so fast. 

My clearest memory is of Simon saying, ‘We’re going to fuck.’ It was a statement, not a question.

For eight weeks, we had what I thought of as a relationship. In fact, it was a set of primarily sexual transactions. These were concluded after Easter when Simon informed me he needed to focus on working for Finals.

Our paths crossed again, during my last year.

At the start of the second term, Simon was the person I saw after I’d tried some self-harm. (This attempt was a result of spending Christmas with my family. ) 

After graduating I knew I could not return to my parents’ house. It was the summer of 1980. I was homeless, jobless, skint and scared. 

Simon was then a postgrad. With money from his parents, he’d rented a rather grand house for the remainder of his doctoral studies. One of his housemates wouldn’t arrive till autumn. He suggested I stay for a while. 

Before I had even unpacked, he made it clear he wanted to have sex with me again. 

I needed to think quickly. If I refused, would Simon find someone else for the vacant room? It was better go along with it. 

For the next forty-five years, I thought of Simon and me as almost equal in folly. There was the zeitgeist, the collegiate culture, our own youth. All of these made errors inevitable. But I had matured, moved away. Simon may have stayed on, but he too would have changed.

Learning about Simon’s later behaviour has been disturbing.

It is hard to accept that I was intimate with a predator, a bully and an abuser. Even if such intimacy was superficial, and represented an early stage of bullying, abusing and predation.

Revisiting – and rewriting – the past is not pleasant. 

Simon Goldhill worked in circles (Kings College, the Classics Faculty) where everyone is intensely visible, Even if his tendency to ‘overstep the mark’ was inbuilt, why was he allowed to get away with it?

There is pain when I think of the people Simon has hurt. There is anger towards the institutions that enabled him.”

(The image shows the teeth of Selachimorpha (shark) in the Provincial Museum of the Sea, in San Cibrao, Galicia, Spain taken by Fernando Losada Rodríguez and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)