'Disgusting' incident involving male massage customer sparks outraged letter to Home Secretary
Owner of the Self Care Retreat in Cosham, is calling for greater protections for beauty therapists
A male customer at a Cosham beauty salon asked a teenage massage therapist to touch his naked backside - and then ejaculated on the bench on which he lay.
His disgusting actions have sparked fury from the beauty salon owner, and the incident has seen Portsmouth North MP Amanda Martin write to the Home Secretary highlighting the need to protect workers in the industry.
It happened at the Self Care Retreat in Cosham, which is a reputable beauty salon.
On Tuesday, August 18, a man who had not been to the salon before booked a massage appointment.
Lesley Dunne, the owner of the Self Care Retreat has strict policies to try to protect her therapists from inappropriate behaviour from customers.
“We have protocols here that if it's a man we don’t know, for our safety we always make sure we have another therapist here,” she said.
As there were at least two therapists on the premises, his appointment went forward as planned.
When asked by his massage therapist, who was 18 at the time, to lie on the massage table, he started acting inappropriately.
“He’d made comments about wanting to remove his underwear because that's what he chooses to do when he gets a massage,” said Lesley. “She obviously said no.”
“He then asked her if his bum could be massaged.”
Feeling uncomfortable, the massage therapist left the room.
“I’ve always said to everyone, if anyone makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe or intimidated, everyone is within their right to kind of stop the treatment, and so that’s what she did,” Lesley said.
After the man had left the salon, the therapist returned into the room to find that he had ejaculated over the sheets on the massage table.
“Naturally, we binned the sheets, but there was one of the disposable sheets where it was that we put into a separate bin bag because we didn't want to put that in our normal waste,” said Lesley.
“The therapist messaged me and said ‘it’s a little bit weird isn't it?’ and I was shocked. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this is really not normal behaviour at all so I initially made a report with the police about it.”
Lesley was first told that police would not be pursuing the incident as they did not believe a crime had been committed, but they have now said that they will be continuing investigations as potential offences were initially overlooked by officers.
A Hampshire Police spokesperson said: “We received a report that on Tuesday, August 18, a man had made inappropriate comments to a woman at a business on Cosham High Street and had caused damage to property.
“Officers have been reviewing all of the evidence available to police at this time and will be conducting further enquiries to establish the full circumstances.”
Lesley said: “I’ve got so many stories as a therapist where things have happened and I think a lot of the time we just brush it off because we feel silly reporting it, or we feel like we know that nothing’s going to happen anyway.
“I think there’s a part of me that thinks that had this happened in a bank or in a shop or another public space, that it would have been taken seriously.
“I feel the industry as a whole just isn’t taken seriously, it’s still seen as a really sexualised job. I still hear comments and people say ‘you do massage, what do you expect?’ None of us come into this job expecting that kind of behaviour.”
In her letter to the Home Secretary, local MP Amanda Martin said: “The Government has rightly taken action to strengthen protections for retail workers through the new standalone offence of assaulting a retail worker under the Crime and Policing Act 2026.
“This incident raises a wider question about whether the protections we have introduced adequately cover workers in other-customer facing sectors.”
She asked the Home Secretary for clarification on if the law covers workers in beauty salons and massage parlours, and if conduct like “highly sexualised comments, unwanted sexual behaviour or deliberate sexual act directed towards or in the presence of a worker” was covered by the legislation.
She said: “Nobody should have to accept sexual harassment, humiliation or degrading behaviour as part of doing their job.
“The fact that someone works in a salon or provides massage or beauty treatment should not make them any less deserving of protection than someone working behind a shop counter.”
Lesley said: “I’d quite like to make a stand amongst so many other therapists who maybe feel like they can’t speak out for themselves or they feel like it's not worth speaking up.”
“I want to protect women from men that think they have a right to do this.”