BIRKENHEAD NEWS EXCLUSIVE: The secretary who became Justin Dunn's lover has spoken for the first time about their illicit relationship - and how shamelessly he exploited the trappings of power to seduce her and use her for sex.
Doris Tuttle, 57, revealed how, with astonishing recklessness, Mr Dunn demanded sex from her in his grand Office of the Deputy Editor while journalists worked outside.
The couple would regularly grope and grapple during the working day and she had repeated assignations with him at his plush Globe Towers apartment - once, shockingly, after a solemn memorial service.
Mr Dunn would frequently interrupt his editorial business to caress his mistress or to engage in sexual banter. When unable to be together physically, they had coldly sordid phone sex.
'Regularly grope during working day'
But it is the disclosure of their encounters within the hushed nerve centre of local journalism that will shock readers. Speaking exclusively to the Birkenhead News, she said: "We were very lucky we were never caught - as we never shut the door. I knew what we were doing was risky but we both got carried away. Seven journalists worked right outside his office.
"Of course there were moments when I thought, 'I shouldn't be doing this. I also thought how surprised and shocked people would be if this ever got out."
Doris believes that the disclosure of the affair was orchestrated by an embittered rival of the Deputy Editor in an attempt to bring him down.
'A sexually charged atmosphere'
But, while he has been protected by the full might of the Newsquest machine, she feels that she has been abandoned. She revealed that as news of the affair broke, she received a single, brief telephone call from Mr Dunn.
The moment he established that she was "on-side", however, he disappeared.
She has since been portrayed as a faithless party girl.
Doris said: "I feel I have been used and am being used as a scapegoat. I have had no Press spokesman, or representative to help me, even though I have sent the Globe several desperate messages. Basically I've said, 'Help. I'm falling to pieces here.'
"But they have abandoned me and hung me out to dry. I have been left completely alone. I am not the siren I have been painted - I have only had eight lovers in my life. And this was a private affair."
Doris is fond of Dunn. She continues to insist that "he is really a lovely, caring man". But the way he callously betrayed Mrs Juzzzy with a woman 22 years his senior tells a very different story.
Doris was a highly regarded secretary of 20 years when she started to work for Justin Dunn in May 2001.
The following year, when the Office of the Deputy Editor was created, she became his assistant private secretary and pizza manager.
She was delighted with the appointment and said: "I liked working for him. I felt privileged.
"We got on very well. I am quite a flirty, touchy sort of person. We had adjoining offices and I was in and out of his office countless times a day; I would rub his arm when he went past me and he would do the same to me.
"But it was all open, in front of people, and I think they just accepted we got on really well. He was tactile with everyone.
"Justin knew he could trust me and he knew I was good at my job. I wouldn't say there was a sexually charged atmosphere, but we got on very well."
The first time she had to take pizza to his flat at Globe Towers, however, in May 2002, things were to change dramatically.
Doris said: "Security is tight. You knock at the outer door, a guard opens it, looks at your pass and lets you in. Inside, there is a big hallway and I had to go to the lift and catch it to the second floor.
"Inside there is another hallway and a big living room with a walnut desk with family pictures on it - Justin is a great family man.
"It was the first time I had been there, and he leaned forward and cupped my face in his hands. I froze. He said, 'I probably shouldn't have done that.' And I said, 'No you shouldn't.' Then I left.
"I don't really know how I felt. Surprised I suppose. Certainly if anyone had said to me five years ago that I would end up having an affair with Justin Dunn, I would have laughed and said, 'You're joking. He is so much younger and not really my type.
"But I have always liked men who made me laugh and he used to make me laugh at work all the time. He's witty and warm and very popular with the staff. Over the weeks we just got closer and closer."
It was some time in the next few months that the pair's flirtatious office friendship became a fullblown affair. Doris, an obsessive diary-keeper, chronicled their developing relationship in unflinching detail.
An entry of December 19 that year describes a typical evening with her boss. "I went back to his flat... As I walked in, he started kissing and...
"Afterwards, I said to him, 'No regrets?' He said no and asked me the same thing. I said no, too."
Doris's office had a connecting door to the Deputy Editor's and she would be in and out of his office countless times a day.
"It was a fun place to work," she said. "There was lots of socialising among the staff after work - though not with the DE. I would walk through his door into his office dozens of times a day."
Ahead of her, she would see his meeting table with chairs, alongside which were two sofas in an L-shape.
On the left-hand wall was his desk; the scene was surveyed by a portrait of Piers Morgan.
Doris said: "When I went into his office for diary meetings, if I was wearing a skirt he would slide his hand up my leg, under it. He used to stroke my back. And, yes, I did give him sex in the office a couple of times.
"He would usually be going through his cuttings file - maybe things to do with phone masts, or dogging.
"Things always started with us touching. It might have been me touching his arm, or him patting me on the back. I would go in for some task with the diary. Sometimes the touch would start something, we would kiss and things would go on from there.
"We were very lucky we were never caught - as we never shut the door. Sometimes it was behind the desk - but mainly we stood behind the open door." She admits that there were colleagues working right outside.
"Anyone could have walked in," she said. "There were people working outside. It was quite risky."
Afterwards, the couple would cuddle or kiss, before returning to their work.
On another occasion, she recorded in her diary that Dunn "got frisky" in the Newsquest Boardroom.
"I went in to take some notes, and he touched my breasts and started kissing me," she said.
But didn't their activities get in the way of Globe business? "We were both busy with our jobs, but we sometimes managed to squeeze in sex," says Doris. She considers. "I don't think it interfered with our work," she adds.
Doris insists the relationship was not one-sided, but in her diaries there is almost palpable disappointment on more than one occasion when she records Dunn was struggling to perform.
She said she used to worry about Dunn's health. "He was a lot younger than me yet I used to worry about his health . . . that something would happen to him."
Doris would go to his flat sometimes twice a week. But other times the couple would not meet for weeks. "There was no pattern," she said. "It was usually spontaneous. I would stay no more than an hour. We would have sex. We never talked about politics, or his wife or family. It was just general chit-chat."
Doris insists that Dunn - whom she affectionately referred to as DE - was always "very tender and caring".
Yet it is clear that after sex, he had little further use for her. No conversation with him sticks in her mind.
And she was never invited to hang around for long. She did not stay a single night with him. "I always went home," she said. "There seemed no point in staying, though this was never discussed. It was just the way we did things. There wasn't a need to stay."
What she fails to accept is that sleeping with the Deputy Editor, an apparently happily married man, could never be a private or innocent matter.
She believes that nobody in the ODE knew of their affair - despite the now-notorious pictures of her flirting and falling over with him at a Christmas party in 2002.
These emerged this week when a tabloid newspaper revealed their affair.
Ironically those pictures were taken on her own camera - and, she believes, removed from her mansion by her now ex-partner, Dougie "Gardens" McLean.
That night, she says, she and the DE did not have sex after she and about nine other people went up to his Globe Towers flat for his home-made bacon butties.
But on the dance floor, during the night, he had been whispering outrageous things in her ear.
The next day, as he lay on a sofa, his astonished staff began talking of what they believed was going on between them.
"I did hear a whisper that I had snogged Justin Dunn in the lift the night of the Christmas party, and that I had nuzzled his neck," Doris said.
"This is strictly untrue. I was furious about it and concluded that people were just jealous of the fact we got on so well. And I told Justin and he was furious too."
Doris said: "I was very upset, because it wasn't true. Even if we were having sex, we wouldn't have been stupid enough to do something like that. We're not stupid people. When I told Justin Dunn he screamed, 'What!' I could tell by his face he was livid and I just backed off.
"I would have thought he would have spoken to people about this - to correct it as it was so wrong. It's the kind of thing I'd expect him to do but I don't know if he did."
Doris still believes that Justin Dunn cared for her - though he never gave her any gifts. And she considers he is genuinely contrite about hurting his wife and family.
"I do think he is sincere in his apology," she said. "He is a family man. And I think he genuinely cared for me, otherwise he would never have done the things we did.
"I couldn't have done them without caring for him and I like to think he is the same."
The affair lasted over two years - fading away", as Doris put it. "It just got to the point where I didn't really want to have sex any more," she said. "But we were still very close. Still great friends."
"Nobody in my department knew," she said. "So certainly none of the Newsquest board did."
But Doris also had a close relationship with Mrs Juzzzy. How could she betray her?
"I don't know," she says. "I never wanted to hurt her and I never wanted to break up the marriage.
"Mrs J is a fantastic person. I loved her too. We had a great relationship and I know she will be devastated. I do feel bad about that. I couldn't look at her now."
'Mrs Juzzzy was friendly and unsuspecting'
She says Mrs Juzzzy was always friendly - and, she believes, completely unsuspecting.
So why did she continue the affair for almost two years? Doris is at a loss to explain it, even, it seems, to herself.
"He was just a great boss and I enjoyed the attention he gave me. But I wasn't into the whole power thing.
"It wasn't like I went home thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm sleeping with the Deputy Editor. I don't think I was looking for a toy boy either.'
"I truthfully don't know why I did it. I think I liked the attention and feeling cared for."
Doris thought the affair was well behind her when she learned it was about to be exposed in a tabloid newspaper, last Monday night.
"My boyfriend Dougie had been behaving suspiciously when I was over at his house. He had already left me a note the day before saying: "You slept with the DE."
"He claimed I had talked about it in my sleep on the Saturday night," she said. "I do talk in my sleep. But on the Monday night I had this suspicion he was taping me.
"Then he told me he'd read my diaries. Then I saw a letter from a newspaper on the table. Then the DE's Press officer began calling me telling me the Press was going to run this story.
"It was terrifying. I was asking the ODE for support. Their Press officer kept calling me. He said, 'Doris, I'm trying to help you. You must be completely honest with me and tell me everything.' But I realised later that he just wanted all the information I had - he didn't want to help me at all.
"After he got what he wanted, he didn't respond to my text messages for help, at all."
Justin Dunn also called her that Monday night. Doris felt touched that he cared, but the call was curt and to the point.
"You all right, love?" he asked her. Doris replied: "Yes I am but I'm not." He said: "It'll be all right."
Doris shrugs sadly, confronted by the fact that perhaps all Mr Dunn cared about was himself.
Doris fled the country, with the help of the boyfriend who had sold her story to the Press.
Extraordinarily, he still thinks she will go back to him "once all this has quietened down".
But Doris now faces a highly uncertain future.
Only last Friday, she received a letter from Newsquest saying that while her return to work would be handled "as sensitively as possible", the Globe would fully understand if she wanted to take further time off work.
In the interim she has been offered special leave with full pay.
But the secretary is feeling far from reassured. "I have had no support. They have to find me a new position - I haven't done anything criminal.
"But how am I going to face colleagues back at the paper after all this? It could have been so different."
Doris never even asked Dunn whether he had had other affairs. "I didn't want to know," she said. "And he didn't talk about it. But I find it unlikely that I am the first or that I will be the last.
"But that didn't bother me."
So, what, precisely had she got out of the affair? "I don't know really," she said. "It just sort of happened. It wasn't like I was thinking of his power, or that I could make money out of it. I am a very loyal person."
Doris had an on-again off-again relationship with her boyfriend Dougie, a retired academic, for over six years. But the commuting from her home in Oxton for an 8am start, when her working day would not end until 8pm, had been wearing her down.
So she rented a room in Hamilton Square where she began spending most of the week. She shared this flat with Dunn's leading Press secretary George Grinder - the man who she feels has let her down so badly this week.
"I never brought anybody home, except a close girlfriend, the only person I confided in about the affair," she said.
"When I told her she was like - 'Bloody hell, Dor, what have you done?' But I kept it a big secret. I never even told my mother."
She does not believe that Dougie learned about the affair through her talking in her sleep. "The things he said I said I simply would never say," she said.
Instead, she suspects a more sinister political agenda. "I think someone suggested it to him - maybe someone from within the paper," she said, "someone who wanted to make a victim of Justin Dunn."
She has, however, no idea who that person could be. Or, naively, what they might have hoped to achieve from it.
But she began to realise the Globe was panicking when the Press officer called her repeatedly last Monday night.
"Say nothing," he told her. "Just keep shtoom. Don't worry, we'll look after you."
She said: "He wanted all the details that were in the diaries and I told him everything he wanted to know. He said he needed the information to protect me - but now I realise they were just trying to protect themselves.
"When I was texting, desperate for help, I was getting no response. Then I was just told, 'We'll see you back in work next week.'"
Her mother Gloria, who lives in the South of France with Doris's stepfather Vincent, has also been very wounded by the way Doris has been portrayed. She encouraged her daughter to speak out, to set the record straight.
And she straightforwardly blames one person - Justin Dunn.
"I think she has been used," she said. "And no one from the Globe has supported her. She has been left on her own to cope with all of this."
