Peter van der Vorst: RTL knew nothing about abuses at The Voice

Like many people in the Netherlands, Van der Vorst does not agree with many of the statements that John de Mol made in the BOOS episode. “In any case, he sat there and tried his way to answer the questions that were put to him, but I found some of his statements very unfortunate. Of course also about where the responsibility for these kinds of things lies.”

According to De Mol, Jeroen Rietbergen did not have a dominant position in his time as band leader at The Voice of Holland. Van der Vorst thinks this is utter nonsense: ”Of course he has a position of power. If you’re a bandleader and you’re working with candidates, you don’t have to think about that, of course there’s a position of power there.”

The program director also says that RTL was not informed about the inappropriate behavior of Rietbergen in 2019. “That should have happened. We understood from the week that Talpa has not reported this to us for privacy reasons. Even without mentioning the victim’s name, the abuse should have been shared with us. Then we could have asked further questions and attached consequences to Jeroen Rietbergen’s behavior. He was fired from us on the spot.”

Van der Vorst does not have a clear answer to the question whether this riot could affect the merger between RTL and Talpa. “We are still in the middle of a storm that is about something completely different than mergers. We are really just concerned with what happened to these women, how this could have happened and how we can prevent this in the future.”

The whole event does not leave him unmoved. ”It touches me enormously. There are no words for what we have seen and heard over the past few days. People who had the trust of the participants in the program abused this in an unacceptable way. It touches me deeply that these women have gone through this. I think they’re very brave and I hope they inspire other women with similar experiences to come forward.”

Several women who work at media company Talpa addressed John today in a full-page advertisement in the Algemeen Dagblad about his performance and statement in the BOOS broadcast yesterday afternoon. AD editor-in-chief Rennie Rijpma was approached last night by an employee of Talpa, she tells RTL Boulevard. She explains how the ad came about.