“Men just randomly passing by reached out and grabbed me… they were touching me, groping me. This one guy kinda leaned in […] and he just said to me, ‘I want to f**k you’, right into my face, even with Livio right there.”
This was just one of the harrowing experiences that Jordan Taylor, an American travel blogger had, when she was recently visiting India. In a vlog she made about the visit, Jordan, who goes by the name ‘Travellight’ on social media, recounted the multiple instances she was sexually harassed while in the national capital New Delhi.
She was forced to confine herself to her room in a hotel when the staff allegedly started sexually harassing her and trying to get her to open the door. This place had apparently partnered with hotel aggregator OYO rooms, which has now taken action against the hotel.
Jordan recounts that the harassment peaked when her boyfriend, Livio, left four days before she was to leave India. By this time, Livio and Jordan had checked into the OYO rooms partnered hotel, identified as the OYO hotel on Main Bazaar Road, Paharganj, Delhi.
Though the couple tried to make it appear as though Livio was still there, the hotel staff saw him leave for the airport early in the morning. What happened next was yet another example of how people continue to respect a man’s presence and claim over a woman above her own will. As soon as Livio left, the hotel staff’s behavior changed towards Jordan, she says in the vlog.
“From that very morning they started acting completely different to me. At one point, one of them even followed me up the stairs. They called the room, and I know for a fact that it was hotel employees because this phone is only for hotel use […] and they said into the phone, ‘Heyyyy babyyyy!’ I hung up. They called the room again and it was just silent and not saying anything. […] The next day, they call the room, I pick up and they were just making sexual noises… breathing. There is no way that this was normal breathing into the phone,” Jordan narrates.
“It was extremely uncomfortable at that point,” she says.
Things took a turn for the worse two days before she was supposed to leave. Jordan was in her room when one of the men knocked and asked her to open the door. When she did not, he allegedly came back an hour later and banged something very hard on the door. But when Jordan still did not relent, someone allegedly turned off the AC from outside the room.
“I heard him flip it (the main switch) off. It was a very distinct sound. Immediately he knocks on my door and says, ‘Hello! The AC is broken. We need to come in and fix it. Open the door and we’ll come and fix the AC.’ And I just said no, I am not answering the door,” Jordan said.
When they tried telling her the same thing over the phone, Jordan said she knew they had turned off the AC and it was not broken.
After this, they stopped knocking but Jordan says she could see shadows outside her door from the gap at the bottom.
“He was right outside my door. There were more people who came, I don’t know who. They would knock and say open the door. Then they shut off the WiFi and said the same story – that they need to come in and fix the WiFi,” Jordan shares.
“I knew that they were lying because the AC wasn’t broken. I just felt so certain that if I did open the door… then. Because they were so desperately trying with lies to get into my room… I did feel very certain that if I did, something very bad would happen. And I still think that it would have,” Jordan says. The trauma is clearly visible on her face at this point.
After a few deep breaths and regaining her composure, she says that the harassment continued for a very long time, almost two days. “I would always see the shadows right underneath the door […] it would move away for a few minutes and they would come back. I knew they were always on the other side of the door. And this went on for two days,” she recounts, still rattled.
She ran out of the water and could not go out to get food. “[I felt like] I am being hunted at the hotel I was staying,” she says.
“The best I can describe it is like I was in a horror movie. It’s in the place where you’re supposed to feel safe and you’re sleeping in your bed at night and you can’t even relax. You can never feel safe. There’s nowhere you can go, you’re trapped.”
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