One morning in November last year Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, received a striking email with a simple, shocking subject line: ‘Attempted rape 1994’.

The sender was a former Goldman employee who had worked on the bank’s foreign exchange trading desk in the 1990s, the same unit that Blankfein later headed up on his rise to the top of Wall Street. The female ex-banker detailed allegations of a traumatising sexual attack by several of her former colleagues at the bank’s London office. She left the bank within a year of the alleged assault with a £58,000 pay off.