Tanja Dik has dismissed claims that she received a dick pic from Marc Overmars in an extensive interview with Het Parool. The chief executive of the Johan Cruyff ArenA firmly denies she was one of the victims of Ajax's former director of football and hits out at Johan Derksen, who brought the story into the open in December 2023 on Vandaag Inside.
At the time, Derksen claimed Dik was the first woman to whom Overmars had sent an inappropriate photo. "We heard yesterday that the first dick pic sent by Marc Overmars ended up with Mrs Dik, the director," the analyst said on 22 December 2023. He then made another remark about her surname: "That is a daughter of Dik, wasn't he with the PTT?"
More than two years later, Dik has swatted that claim away. "No, of course not," she responds firmly when asked whether she was the first woman to receive a dick pic from Overmars. "What Marc Overmars did is so crazy. What do you think I would have done, now that you have heard me talk for a while? He would have got it both barrels from me."
She insists she would never have let something like that pass without consequences. "Then I would have called him and said: 'Cuckoo, Harry, that is not wise.' But it is not about what is being said, but who made a story out of it, namely VI, Johan Derksen," said the director of the Johan Cruyff ArenA.
Despite that, Dik chose not to respond publicly to Derksen's comments at the time, a decision she now deeply regrets. "I was advised against it and I still regret that. Not responding does not suit me at all. People said: responding to it only makes it worse. But then I think: worse than what?", she wonders aloud.
In Dik's view, nobody in her immediate circle believed she had actually received a dick pic from Overmars. "The people who know me did not think for a second that this had happened. Of course Marc Overmars does not choose Tanja, CEO of the Arena. It was a joke," she says. Dik did, however, feel compelled to gather all the female employees of the ArenA and make it clear by email that the story was untrue.
What bothered her most was the suggestion that she would have accepted Overmars's inappropriate behaviour without stepping in. "I said: the worst thing is that you think there is a female CEO sitting here, who also has to stand up for your safety, who would have received this and would have done nothing about it. So would have let him carry on. Over my dead body," said Dik.
Should Dik find herself in a similar situation again, she says she would tackle it head-on. "Yes, I would now go and sit in that programme. I am a fighter. And the world is only getting worse for women," she declares.