Tag: Rape

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Entertainment

Police in China Detain Canadian Pop Star Kris Wu on Suspicion of Rape

Police in China Detain Canadian Pop Star Kris Wu on Suspicion of Rape

The police in Beijing said Saturday they had detained Kris Wu, a popular Canadian Chinese singer, on suspicion of rape amid a #MeToo controversy that has set off outrage in China.

The police did not provide details of their investigation into Mr. Wu. But it comes several weeks after an 18-year-old university student in Beijing accused him of enticing young women like herself with the promise of career opportunities, then pressuring them into having sex.

Known in China as Wu Yifan, Mr. Wu, 30, is the most prominent figure in China to be detained over #MeToo allegations.

He rose to fame as a member of the Korean pop band EXO, then started a successful solo career as a model, actor and singer. Though he denied the allegations when they first surfaced, they set off an uproar that led at least a dozen companies, including Bulgari, Louis Vuitton and Porsche, to sever ties with the singer.

The Chaoyang District branch of the Beijing police said in a statement on social media on Saturday night that it had been looking into accusations posted online that Mr. Wu “repeatedly deceived young women into sexual relations.” It said that Mr. Wu had been detained while the criminal investigation continued.

Mr. Wu’s accuser, Du Meizhu, has said publicly that when she first met Mr. Wu in December last year, she was taken by the singer’s agent to his home in Beijing for work-related discussions. She said that she was pressured to drink cocktails until she passed out, and later found herself in his bed.

They dated until March, according to her account of the events, when he stopped responding to her calls and messages. She has also said she believed that he targeted other young women.

Mr. Wu’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Ms. Du could not be reached.

It was not immediately clear if the police were specifically investigating Ms. Du’s claims. In a statement in July, the police had released what appeared to be preliminary findings about Ms. Du’s allegations. The police had said Ms. Du had hyped her story “to enhance her online popularity,” an assessment that was criticized by her supporters as victim shaming.

The outpouring of support for Ms. Du was a sign that the country’s nascent #MeToo movement continues to grow despite the government’s strict limits on activism and dissent. After Ms. Du spoke out, her supporters flooded the social media pages of several brands, threatening boycotts if they did not drop their partnerships with Mr. Wu, a campaign that quickly forced the companies to distance themselves from him.

The accusations have triggered a heated debate on issues like victim-shaming, consent and abuse of power in the workplace — concepts that had rarely featured in mainstream discussions before the #MeToo movement went global.

The authorities in China often discourage women from filing sexual misconduct complaints, and sexual assault or harassment survivors are frequently shamed and even sued for defamation. Censorship and limits on dissent have also stymied efforts among feminist activists to organize, even as trolls are given cover to spew abuse.

Yet the high-profile nature of the controversy made Ms. Du’s allegations impossible to ignore for Chinese authorities, who are always on the lookout for what they deem to be potential sources of social unrest.

The police announcement, posted on the country’s popular Weibo social media platform, immediately started trending, drawing more than six million likes.

Lu Pin, a New York-based feminist activist, said the detention of Mr. Wu was a major step forward for the #MeToo movement in China.

“Regardless of what the motivation of the police may have been, just the fact that he was detained is huge,” Ms. Lu said.

“For the last three years, a number of prominent figures have faced #MeToo accusations but nothing ever happened to them,” Ms. Lu said. “Now with Wu Yifan, #MeToo has finally taken down someone with real power in China — it has shown that no matter how powerful you are, rape is not acceptable.”

The detention of Mr. Wu comes amid a broader government crackdown on the entertainment industry.

In recent years, Chinese authorities have moved aggressively to clean up the industrywide problem of tax evasion and to cap salaries for the country’s biggest movie stars. In June, the country’s internet watchdog began a crackdown on what it called the country’s “chaotic” online celebrity fan clubs, which the government has come to see as an increasing source of volatility in public opinion.

The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, depicted Mr. Wu’s detention as a warning to celebrities that neither fame nor a foreign citizenship would shield them from the law.

“A foreign nationality is not a talisman. No matter how famous one is, there is no immunity,” the propaganda outlet wrote. “Remember: The higher the popularity, the more you must be self-disciplined, the more popular you are, the more you must abide by the law.”

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World News

U.Okay. Justice System Has Failed Rape Victims, Authorities Says

U.K. Justice System Has Failed Rape Victims, Government Says

LONDON — Thousands of rape and sexual assault victims have been failed by the criminal justice system, according to a British government review released Friday that cited a dramatic fall in convictions in England and Wales in recent years, prompting an apology from government ministers.

In an interview with the BBC, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said that the findings of the review revealed “systemic failings” to deal with complaints made by victims “at all stages of the criminal justice process.”

He added: “The first thing I think I need to say is sorry, it’s not good enough. We’ve got to do a lot better.”

The review, which only covered cases with adult victims but acknowledged that children and young people were also subject to sexual assaults, was commissioned in March 2019 by the Conservative government. The review was intended to address the decline in rape prosecutions, which the Ministry of Justice said fell 59 percent, and convictions, which have dropped by 47 percent, since 2015-2016.

In that period, reported rapes of adults jumped to 43,187 from 24,093, according to Office for National Statistics numbers cited in the report.

But the government estimates that fewer than 20 percent of rape cases are actually reported to the police, and that the number of victims is about 128,000 a year. Of reported cases, which the statistics office said involved women in 84 percent of cases, just 1.6 percent resulted in a person being charged, according to the Home Office.

The report came as Britain grapples with a national reckoning over male violence against women that erupted in March after a police officer was arrested in the killing of a young woman, Sarah Everard. The officer, Wayne Couzens, 48, pleaded guilty to the rape and kidnapping of Ms. Everard this month.

In the report released Friday, Mr. Buckland, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Attorney General Michael Ellis said they were “deeply ashamed” of the decline in the number of prosecutions for rape cases, and the fact that one in two victims withdrew from rape investigations.

The review also found that the reasons for the decline in cases reaching court are “complex and wide-ranging,” including an “increase in personal digital data being requested, delays in investigative processes, strained relationships between different parts of the criminal justice system, a lack of specialist resources and inconsistent support to victims.”

Emily Hunt, an independent adviser to the review who was herself a victim of rape, said in the report that the low prosecution rate could not be attributed to possible false claims, which government data suggests accounts for up to 3 percent of rape allegations.

Katie Russell, the national spokeswoman for Rape Crisis, a charity that is part of a coalition of women’s groups called End Violence Against Women, welcomed the government’s admission of its own “catastrophic failures.”

However, she said, the drop in prosecutions could not be accounted for by cuts in funding and resources alone, which Mr. Buckland alluded to in his interview with the BBC.

“It’s clear there are wider cultural issues and issues of the actual functioning of the criminal justice system, in relation to rape and sexual offenses,” said Ms. Russell.

The review acknowledged that victims of rape have been treated “poorly.” In some instances, as they were struggling to deal with the psychological toll of reporting their rapes, they were informed that their cases would not be taken any further, sometimes without explanation.

Bonny Turner, a sexual assault activist who has gone public about her experience with an investigation of her 2016 rape allegations, which was dropped by prosecutors because of insufficient evidence, said the report’s findings came as little comfort.

The report did not make any reference to how the government “is going to redress the situation with those of us who have already been failed,” she said. “It’s as if they feel as though they think they can just get away with an apology but no action to back that up.”

The government said in the review that it would push for a “cultural change” in the police and among prosecutors to return the number of rape cases reaching court to “pre-2016 levels.”

The government added that sexual assault investigations would focus on the behavior patterns of accused attackers, and try to avoid undermining the credibility of victims — a failure that was highlighted in the report.

Citing rape victims who felt traumatized by having their phones taken away and examined during investigations, the review said victims would no longer be left without their devices for more than 24 hours.

Vulnerable victims will also be allowed to record video evidence in advance instead of being forced to endure the trauma of giving public testimony during trials.

Vera Baird, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales — an independent adviser to the government — welcomed the ministers’ apologies over what she described as an “abysmal record.”

She said the government had taken too long to confront “what victims have been saying for years,” adding that the review underscored numerous missed opportunities. “Despite its clear limitations, we have to seize this moment if we are to escape this crisis in our justice system. I truly hope this review will drive us forwards. Indeed, it can’t get much worse.”

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World News

Harvey Weinstein appeals rape conviction in MeToo case

Harvey Weinstein appeals rape conviction in MeToo case

Harvey Weinstein enters the courthouse on July 11, 2019 in New York City.

Stephanie Keith | Getty Images

Film producer Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers appealed his conviction of rape and another sex crime on Monday.

69-year-old Weinstein was convicted after a trial in the Manhattan Supreme Court in February 2020.

He is serving a 23-year prison sentence on trial two years after Weinstein’s explosion of explosive sexual misconduct allegations that sparked the #MeToo movement that has derailed the careers of other high-profile men to this day.

In a lawsuit, his attorneys set seven grounds for overturning the conviction of the producer of such films as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love and Gangs of New York.

These include allegations that Weinstein was denied the right to be tried by an impartial jury when the trial judge denied his challenge to banning a potential juror who wrote an autobiographical book on “The Predators of Older Men Against Younger Women.” and had lied about the substance of the book in the “selection of the jury.

Defense attorneys also argued that Weinstein was denied his right to a fair trial because the jury was allowed to hear allegations of serious sexual misconduct from him that were not the subject of the specific charges he faced and that defense experts were wrongly excluded from testimony became the subject of memories of sexual events.

And, the lawyers argued, Weinstein received “a punishment that was harsh and excessive”.

The complaint is filed with the Appeals Department of the Manhattan Supreme Court.

“We filed a 166-page brief listing some serious errors that were made during the process,” Weinstein’s appellate attorney Barry Kamins said in a statement to CNBC.

“We are confident the Appeals Department will take these issues seriously enough to have the conviction overturned,” said Kamins.

The jury sentenced Weinstein to a first-degree criminal sexual act by forcibly performing oral sex with production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006. He was also found guilty of third degree rape for assaulting aspiring actress Jessica Mann in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.

During the trial, the jury heard testimony from actress Annabella Sciorra, who said Weinstein raped her in her Manhattan apartment in 1993.

Weinstein was not accused of raping Sciorra, but her testimony, along with that of five other women, was admitted by the judge on trial so that prosecutors could show a pattern of predatory behavior by the film mogul. Numerous other women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct.

Another Weinstein attorney, Arthur Aidala, said, “With a year behind and emotions waning, the case record confirms what we have always believed: that Mr. Weinstein did not get a fair trial.”

“We will argue that the trial judge violated well-accepted and fundamental principles of New York law and violated Mr. Weinstein’s constitutional rights,” Aidala said. “We are very confident that the Appeals Department will correct these mistakes and send this case back to another judge.”

In addition to the New York case, Weinstein is also facing pending charges filed by the Los Angeles prosecutor in January 2020. She accused him of raping a woman and sexually assaulting a second woman over a period of two days in 2013.

The Los Angeles attorney has an extradition request pending for Weinstein, who is being held in a New York State prison. Weinstein, who has several health problems, tested positive for the coronavirus in prison in March 2020.

Weinstein founded the entertainment company Miramax with his brother Bob Weinstein.

They later founded The Weinstein Company, another film production company that filed for bankruptcy in early 2018 following the damned Harvey Weinstein charges, which were first published in The New Yorker and The New York Times. The Weinstein Company closed later that year.

– CNBCs Kevin Breuninger contributed to this article.

Categories
Business

Maggots, Rape and But 5 Stars: How U.S. Rankings of Nursing Houses Mislead the Public

Maggots, Rape and Yet Five Stars: How U.S. Ratings of Nursing Homes Mislead the Public

The pandemic has exposed the shortcomings in the state’s rating system.

State health inspections do little to punish homes with poor records of preventing and controlling infection. According to The Times, from 2017 to 2019 inspectors cited nearly 60 percent – more than 2,000 – of the country’s five-star facilities for failing to follow basic safety precautions such as regular hand washing. Nevertheless, they received top marks.

In San Bernardino, California, inspectors have written to Del Rosa Villa about four different infection control violations. It kept its five stars. Ninety residents at the 104-bed facility contracted the coronavirus and 13 have died.

Del Rosa Villa officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The Life Care Centers of Kirkland, Washington, the first nursing home in the United States to document coronavirus cases, reported poor infection control despite its five stars in 2019. State inspectors wrote it down because they “failed to consistently implement an effective infection control program”.

Thirty-nine residents of the facility have died from Covid-19. The house has 190 beds.

Leigh Atherton, a spokeswoman for Life Care, said the citation was the only infection control flaw that inspectors had found on more than 32 previous visits. She said the house quickly fixed the problem.

If the rating system had worked as intended, it would have provided indications of which houses were most likely to get out of hand and which houses would be likely to get messed up.

That didn’t happen.

The Times noted that there was little correlation between star ratings and the condition of homes during the pandemic. In five-star facilities, the death rate from Covid-19 was only half a percentage point lower than in facilities with lower ratings. And the death rate was slightly lower in two-star facilities than in four-star homes.

The location of a facility, the infection rate in the surrounding community, and the race of nursing home residents were all predictors of whether a nursing home would have an outbreak. The star rating didn’t matter.

Categories
World News

Girls Name for India’s Chief Justice to Stop Over Remarks in Rape Circumstances

Women Call for India’s Chief Justice to Quit Over Remarks in Rape Cases

NEW DELHI – Indian outrage is growing over comments from the nation’s chief judge on two rape cases. Thousands of women signed a letter this week demanding his resignation.

Judge Sharad Arvind Bobde, the head of India’s Supreme Court, asked a 23-year-old man accused of raping a minor whether he would marry his victim, who is now an adult.

The victim, who cannot be identified under Indian law, accused the man, a distant relative and official of the Maharashtra state government, of repeatedly persecuting and raping her from the age of 16.

The judge’s comments sparked new demands that those in power, and especially men, do more to improve the treatment of women and girls in India.

A spate of shocking attacks in recent years has led women’s groups and other activists to change long-standing attitudes towards sexual violence.

Justice for victims is rare. Of the tens of thousands of rape cases reported annually in India, only a handful result in law enforcement, according to figures from the National Crime Records Bureau. Activists say the real scope of the problem is far worse, as many cases are never reported because of the stigma.

On Monday, Justice Bobde heard a petition from the defendant in the rape case for relief from a lower court prison order.

“Do you want to marry her?” Justice Bobde asked about Indian media reports.

“You should have thought before seducing and raping the young girl,” he added. “We’re not forcing you to marry. Let us know if you want. “

Activists said they were “appalled and outraged”.

“Your proposal to view marriage as a friendly solution to the case of the rape of an underage girl is worse than cruel and insensitive, as it profoundly undermines the victims’ right to seek justice,” the company said on Tuesday open letter.

Justice Bobde did not respond.

Sex with minors is a crime in India under the Child Protection from Sexual Offenses Act 2012. Mandatory sentences range from 10 years in prison to life imprisonment, and bail is rarely given.

According to court records, the families agreed that the man would marry the girl when she turned 18. The man later failed to keep his promise and married someone else. When the family filed a lawsuit against the man in 2019, a district court granted him early bail.

However, the Bombay Supreme Court overturned this ruling and wrote a scathing criticism of the lower court.

“Such an approach is a clear indication that the learned judge is completely lacking in competence,” the court wrote.

The defendant then turned to the Supreme Court. Justice Bobde and the other two members of the bank granted him four weeks of protection from arrest.

More than 4,000 women signed the letter calling for the Chief Justice to resign, including Anuradha Banerji, an activist with the Saheli women’s rights group.

“When the Chief Justice of India makes these archaic and patriarchal comments, it signals the deeper rot in both the judicial system and society,” Ms. Banerji said. “Millions of young girls will know that their values ​​are marriageability, not personality.”

The victim’s lawyer declined to comment on Friday.

In another case, Justice Bobde appeared to condone consensual rape, according to the letter and media reports.

“If two people live as husbands and wives, however brutal the husband may be, can sexual intercourse between them be called rape?” Justice Bobde asked upon hearing a petition filed by a man accused of rape by a woman who had been his life partner.

The excitement over the judge’s comments comes a month after another Bombay Supreme Court judge, Judge Pushpa Ganedivala, blocked her promotion after criticizing several of her sexual assault rulings.

Her decision in a child abuse case that groping for a minor without skin contact could not be described as sexual assault under the Child Protection Act sparked outrage. She acquitted the man who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old by a lower court. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling after the Indian Attorney General said he had set a dangerous precedent.

In two separate cases, Justice Ganedivala acquitted two other men accused of raping minors and said the victims’ statements were unreliable.

Following her rulings, a Supreme Court panel led by Justice Bobde overturned her decision to make her permanent judge on the Bombay Supreme Court.