New Employee Says Her Workplace Mentor Called Her a “Naughty Girl,” Boxed Her In at Work, and Kept Pushing Her To Confide in Him

Starting a new job is stressful enough without realizing the person assigned to “help” you might actually be the one making you dread coming in.

That is exactly what happened in one Reddit story after a woman said she had barely started a new job when her workplace mentor started acting in ways that made her skin crawl. At first, she tried to manage it quietly. She said he was an older man, always pushing for one-on-one lunches, always talking up how “dependable” and supportive he was, and constantly hinting that she should feel safe opening up to him about personal things. Even then, she said something about him felt off.

According to the post, she had already started trying to protect herself in small ways. She kept their meetings in the morning, in common areas, and not somewhere private. But he apparently kept finding ways to push past that. She said he would pop up wherever she was, stand extremely close to her, and even use his size to sort of box her in near desks, vending machines, and elevators. That detail alone is enough to make your stomach tighten, because you can instantly picture how exhausting and unnerving that would feel when you are brand new at a company and still trying to keep your footing.

Then came the conversation that made everything click.

She said he wanted to talk about treating their relationship as a “safe space,” which was already weird enough. But then, according to her post, he called her a “naughty girl” for not being more open with him. And when he tried to explain what he meant by openness, the examples he gave were not normal mentor stuff at all. She said he started listing the things other people had supposedly shared with him, including their sex lives, sexual positions, fetishes, and relationship issues. That was the moment where it stopped sounding like “awkward older coworker” behavior and started sounding like something a lot more disturbing.

And apparently, that was not even the first red flag. In a comment, she added that he had touched her hijab and made an off-color remark about it, which was bad enough that she had already started documenting their interactions by email before the “naughty girl” conversation ever happened. That part really lands, because you can feel how hard she had been trying to stay calm and fair about it. She was not someone leaping to conclusions over one weird comment. She had already been noticing a pattern and trying to leave a trail just in case it got worse. And then it absolutely did.

She asked whether changing mentors was enough or if she should also report it more formally, and honestly, it is easy to see why she was torn. It was only her second week at the job. She said she was nervous because she did not have hard proof and worried it could turn into a “he said, she said” situation. That is such a familiar fear in stories like this. So many people know something is wrong before they feel like they have enough to prove it, and that gap can make it so much harder to speak up.

Then the update came, and honestly, it was one of those rare moments where a story like this does not drag on forever.

She said she was out for a religious holiday, came back, and found what she called a “scorched earth” situation at work. According to her, the mentor had been fired — not quietly eased out, not asked to resign, but fired outright. And that was not all. One of the main people overseeing the mentorship program was fired too, which made her suspect this was not the first time something like this had happened and had maybe been brushed aside before. She said a company-wide memo went out reiterating zero tolerance for harassment, specific departments were assigned sensitivity training, and HR handled everything rapidly and seriously once she reported it.

There was even this oddly human little detail in the update that makes the whole thing feel more real: she came back to find a basket of chocolates, fancy cheese, and wine waiting on her desk. She wrote that she had a proper cry over the relief of it all, especially because there did not seem to be any backlash from coworkers or superiors. And honestly, after reading everything that came before it, that moment hits hard. She had spent her second week at a new job getting cornered and creeped out by a man who was supposed to guide her, and then suddenly the company actually believed her and acted fast. That kind of relief probably would make anybody cry.

The comments were full of people saying the same thing: thank God someone took it seriously. A lot of readers were relieved not only that the mentor was gone, but that the company did not try to gaslight her into thinking she had misunderstood what was happening. Because let’s be honest — once a man is calling a new employee a “naughty girl,” touching her hijab, boxing her in physically, and steering conversations toward sex and fetishes, there is really not much left to interpret. If your brand-new workplace mentor started acting like that in your second week, would you report him right away — or worry, like she did, that no one would believe you?