On her first day working as a 1999 Mario Battal assistant, Laurie Woolver, then 25, went into a taxi with the famous chef to go to a television shoot.
“Slide those thighs,” he told her. Woolver was amazed.
“As if he really expected me to hug me in the first five minutes of my first day at work,” she writes in her new memory, “Care and Feeding” (Ecco, Out Tuesday). “It was a flexible of power. He was trying my boundaries.”
The Battal would try Woolever’s borders again and again in the years he spent working on him while his star Rose and his Flag restaurant, Babbo, became one of the hottest tables in New York City.
At the beginning of her mandate working for a battal, he asked her to accompany her to Atlantic City, where she was making a cooking demo and signs books at the Resorts World.
When they arrived at the hotel, writes Woolever, the Battal put his arms around her and her friend and stated, “These are my prostitutes, Dottie and Matilda.”
During the dinner that night at the Battal Hotel restaurant, Woolver said she was full of lunch and could just order a salad.
“Absolutely F-King, not, Woolie, no F-kick way you are just getting a spinach salad,” “She said, she remembers in the book ..” When you are with me, you will order a cocktail, a snack, an expensive pasta, an entrance, a dessert, a course of cheese, and an Amaro or an expensive. “
Then, she writes, at one point during the decadent meal, the battle bowed to the friend of Woolever and said to her, “You know, I have a coke can d – k. There is a jacuzzi in my suite. I will hold you next to your ankles and hang you on it.”
Battal, she writes, soon continued to hand over their waiter some $ 20 bills and ask “Where are the best strips?”
They ended up at a ribbon club called Bare Expour. There were more drinking, laps, karaoke and blackjack in the casino followed.
“Great Dinner FREE, all that blooms … a Titty bar, two delightful young women for the evening and a $ 50,000 fee for his two cooking demonstrations: he was living a life completely without consequences,” Woolever writes.
In her years working for the chef, Woolever notes that he was regularly sexually unsuitable for her and her colleagues, writing, “It was an open secret that Mario withdrew from women to staff.”
The post has reached the comment battal.
But years would pass before the consequences of his actions were caught with him. In 2017, at the height of the #metoo movement, a number of women came forward accusing a battle of harassment and sexual assault.
The Battal issued a public pardon in the course of the allegations, writing “My behavior was wrong and there are no excuses. I take full responsibility.”
He faced criminal charges of improper attack and battery in a Boston court for groping a woman, but was ultimately found guilty of criminal charges. Two women filed lawsuits against him who were resolved. In 2019, he sold his actions in his restaurant empire.
When the accusations came to light, Woolever was working for Anthony Bourdain, who had often presented a battal at his television shows.
She recalls that Bourdain initially seemed shocked at the news, saying to her, “I saw her drunk and maybe very touched, but I never saw what made a woman feel visibly uncomfortable or difficult.”
Woolver is less surprised, but she writes, “The term attack came as shock.”
As for the way she looks at her experiences, she writes that “never really felt [a victim]and had benefited from years of access and association. Of course, I would cry when Mario grabbed my donkey and felt sick of his behavior, but wasn’t I drunk with him, laughing at his jokes and made them too much? “
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