Last week Green, 36, was awarded more than £800,000 by the High Court for the sustained bullying campaign she endured over four years while working for the German investment bank. The judge established that she had been driven to a nervous breakdown by the antics of a gang of four female colleagues and a man who was after her job.

The court heard that the campaign of harassment against Green had been so "offensive, abusive, intimidating, denigrating, bullying, humiliating, patronising, infantile and insulting" that it had driven her to a nervous breakdown. And although her case was the most high profile at the bank, Green insists in this, her only interview, that her experience was by no means unusual.

In her dozen-strong unit, she says, three others went on antidepressants and one former colleague even flew from New Zealand to unburden her own horror story to the court.

So why has there been so little sympathy for Green since the details of the case came to light? Scorn and opprobrium have been heaped on her head for getting in such a stew over playground abuse. The screaming of "you stink", and raspberries blown across the office, say television, radio and newspaper pundits, do not entitle the victim to £828,000 in compensation.

One particularly vicious press attack said Green’s award was "an insult to everything we women have fought for . . . I could not find a single incident in the alleged behaviour of these supposed tormentors that would not be shrugged off by most of us as petty office politics and therefore best dismissed with cold-shouldered contempt . . . on one occasion cited in court, a colleague apparently crossed her arms in a very dramatic way and stared at Ms Green while she washed her hands at the ladies’ wash basin and this was apparently enough to make Ms Green so depressed she had a nervous breakdown. It beggars belief that our High Court’s time should be occupied by such drivel".

A closer inspection of Helen Green’s story and a few hours spent in her company, convinced me that such attacks are not just wrong but unjust. Hers is the story of a fragile person thrown into a hostile environment that had defeated more robust personalities than hers could ever be.

Even in a crowded room you can spot Green; there is something about her that seems weak; damaged, even. She clutches a vast red ring-binder that catalogues every water-cooler snub and every backstabbing trick that her former colleagues pulled. Her eyes dart nervously and when she shakes hands she does not move towards you or engage; she shrinks back. She is defensive and anxious.

Immediately she tells me that she used to be a size 8 but has gone up to a size 14 due to her antidepressants, and her hair is showing the first streaks of grey. Yet occasionally a glimpse of a rather different young woman sneaks through — when she smiles you see snatches of the vivacious young person she must once have been.

Simply because she toiled in the City, Green has been dubbed a "high flyer", but as an assistant company secretary Green was strictly a backroom girl, although she was not, as she fears we believe, a glorified typist. A company secretary manages the processes that ensure the organisation complies with company legislation and regulation and keeps board members informed of their legal responsibilities.

She reports that her "package" at the bank was £65,000 a year. But for two years since she left, while she has been fighting the case, she has been living in London’s East End on social security. "This case," she says, "has broken my heart. All I wanted to be from the age of 19 was a company secretary. The bank tried to make out I was insane — it even investigated if my mother was a schizophrenic."

It was so different, a little less than a decade ago, when she donned her best suit and strode through the gleaming portals of Deutsche Bank. "I was," she smiles, "very proud."

And with reason: "I had got there without privilege or even support." Having escaped her abusive adoptive father at the age of 16, she had moved into a bedsit, worked, put herself through university to get a degree over a number of years and embarked on a business career. Reaching the Square Mile, for her, was to climb the winner’s podium.