The dating expert, 43, famous as an expert on Married At First Sight, had been staying a Holiday Inn hotel in Portsmouth.
Married At First Sight UK expert Charlene Douglas has accused the staff at a British hotel of racism.
The dating expert, 43, had been staying a Holiday Inn hotel in Portsmouth branding the incident “racism at its core” and suggested that guest relations were “not taking it seriously at all”.
Taking to Instagram, Charlene wrote: “Cannot believe the racism my family and I have just received from staff and a guest at Holiday Inn Gunnwharf Quays (Portsmouth).
“Think 1950s Alabama – the words ‘from your people’ still resounding in my head!” She added that it was an “awful, humiliating experience”.
She later explained what happened in a video, saying that as a Londoner that you don’t see racism “so blatantly”.
Charlene, her sister Deborah, their mum and her niece had decided to go for a weekend break as her mum had been struggling with her health. They booked a Holiday Inn in Portsmouth, but noticed when they got there it felt “a bit not great”.
“There were a group of older white people, men and women, sat just staring at us at everything we were doing like it was as if we were the entertainment,” she said. “It felt really uncomfortable and it felt very different from my usual experience.
“People know me from TV so they might look at me and then maybe say hi or they might say, ‘I really like your hair’, my nails, something like that but it felt really different. It’s really hard to explain that but it felt different. But it kept happening throughout the hotel, we were just stared at.”
She continued to explain that there had been a particular person working there that she described as “sarcastic and rude”.
“Earlier in the day I’d asked him a question about the menu and I was just really really taken aback because he kept frowning as if I wasn’t speaking English,” she said. “He was like, ‘Oh, you mean menu’? I don’t normally feed into that, obviously you guys know what I do for a living, I’m used to dealing with different types of people. So I just thought, this guy’s got issues and I just didn’t think much of it.”
While there were other uncomfortable moments at the hotel, there was a particular incident that left Charlene shocked and “shaking”. Her sister had wanted to change her room so that it could be closer to Charlene and their mum, which the hotel agreed to.
“My sister went to the front desk and we were met by the same guy that has been rude and just sarcastic to us throughout,” Charlene recalled. “I also observed him with other people and was engaging, laughing, joking around and I was like, oh, so you can be nice but I just didn’t understand it. No matter what we did, he just wasn’t being nice.
“He said to Deborah, ‘Okay, that’s fine, you’ve got your two keys there’ and Deborah was like, ‘Okay, so I’m going to go back in my room to collect my belongings and then I’ll go into the other room and I’ll move my stuff over there.’ He was like, ‘Fine’.”
However, Deborah made the long journey up flights of stairs with her four-year-old daughter, only to find that her original room key had been deactivated. Charlene’s sister then returned to the reception desk to say that she was unhappy as she had told him she needed to go back to the room to collect her things.
“Now I thought that what Deborah would be met with would be an apology,” Charlene said. “But no, what we got was, ‘Well, what do you expect me to do? Am I supposed to know everything?’ And it was along that narrative. So then Deborah said something along the lines of ‘this is not very polite, we don’t really understand why you’re behaving like this’. And he was like ‘Woah, you’re shouting, you’re being aggressive. If you’re going to shout, I’m not going to deal with you.’
“And then I was watching all this and I sort of said, ‘My sister’s not shouting’ and then he came out of his spate of hate and then he looked at me and he realised, ‘Oh, someone was watching this’. And I said, ‘This is really interesting because she wasn’t shouting’ and he was like, ‘Yes she was, she was shouting and she’s been really aggressive.'”
Charlene denied that her sister was being aggressive and said that she knew she wasn’t because she’s not like that and her daughter was there watching. She explained that he began to raise his voice and kept saying that she was now shouting.
The MAFS star described the moment as “confusing and humiliating”. She continued: “He then proceeds to say, ‘You’re calling me racist’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I used that word, but what I feel uncomfortable about is as a black person that literally as soon as my sister, who is black, is sharing that she’s angry, frustrated, disappointed with what you have done, which is deactivate the room, so she can’t go in and get her stuff.’ What we’re getting is this whole narrative of her being aggressive and intimidating and all of whatever else he said.”
She said that she was “so shocked” and was staring at him. The pair continued to go back-and-forth before the shocking moment she likened to something she imagined would happen in the US.
“This lady then came over, probably late 50s or early 60s, white lady with blonde hair and stood very close to my sister, grimacing face, really quite angry and said something like ‘This is what they do.’ So I looked at her and I remember saying to her, ‘Sorry, who are you? Are you management?’ She’s like, ‘No, I’m a guest here, but I know what you people are like. I remember working years ago and you people accused me of racism.’
“So I went over to her and I said, ‘When you say, ‘You people’, what do you mean?’ Of course, I’ve heard it enough times, right. She said, ‘Your type of people.'”
She said that as a black woman, she was used to experiencing different forms of racism, but this shocked her a lot. Charlene said that the man at the desk appeared to hear the woman and was nodding, which she described as seeming like they were “colluding with one another”. She then explains the woman went over to another staff member and started whispering about them as they looked at them.
Charlene said her body was shaking from anxiety over the incident as other guests from another table stared at them “as if [they] were to blame”. She has requested CCTV from the hotel following the incident as she knows they aren’t to blame. Her sister attempted to report what had happened to guest relations, but Charlene recalled: “They were like, ‘We’ll go back in and see if we’ll let you in’, as if we’re dogs.”
The MAFS star claimed that guest relations did nothing and that her sister emailed both the CEO and head of HR and they did nothing either. “No one’s taking it seriously,” she said.
Following posting her story, Charlene said she had a lot of DMs from people who had similar bad experiences of that hotel. However, she has since also had a phone call from one of the directors, but only because her previous post went viral.
A spokesperson for Holiday Inn Express Portsmouth Gunwharf Quays told the Mirror: “We are very sorry to hear about the experience reported by these guests. Discrimination has no place in our hotel and we take these concerns seriously. We are urgently looking into what happened, how the situation was handled, and are in contact with those involved. We are committed to ensuring everyone who stays with us is treated with dignity and respect.”
Among those to comment on her post was Strictly winner Ore Oduba, who wrote: “Blood raised to boiling as I was listening to this, Charlene I’m so sorry you and your family experienced this atrocity. Calling out the worst of people, this is our power. Thank you for your light darling x.”
While MAFS star Luke Worley commented: “Hope you’re all okay! I had an incident similar from the same company a couple of years ago at their Greenwich hotel. They literally didn’t care at all.”
Ella Morgan wrote: “Disgusting. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I hope you and your family are ok. Sending love.” Lacey Martin fumed: “That’s disgusting!!! I’m so sorry!!! I hope you and ur family are okay. this is unacceptable!!!”
Anna Williamson commented: “This is appalling Charlene. Please hold these people accountable. And sending love.”
IHG also commented on the post: “@charlenedouglasofficial We’re sorry to hear about this as it’s certainly not the experience we want for any of our guests.
“Could you please DM us with your stay details so we can learn more and investigate this?”
Charlene was a dating expert on Married At First Sight alongside Paul C Brunson and Mel Schilling before Channel 4 announced it had axed the show.
An external review was prompted by a BBC Panorama investigation, which included allegations of rape on the programme. Two women who participated in the show made allegations of rape and a third of sexual misconduct by their on-screen husbands, speaking in the BBC special which aired in May.
In June a MAFS UK cast member was arrested on suspicion of rape. All three men deny the claims. In the BBC investigation called The Dark Side of Married at First Sight, which aired in May, several women said they felt the programme did not do enough to protect them.
Before the revelations were made public, MAFS was one of the channel’s biggest and most successful series regularly pulling in more than three million viewers.
But it will now never be seen on the channel again as Channel 4 confirmed in a press release: “the right course was to bring MAFS UK on Channel 4 to an end”.
Channel 4 Chief Executive Priya Dogra confirmed that the programme “has now run its course”.
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