Oxfam boss slept with me when I was 16 years old, claims Haiti prostitute
A week on, he breaks his silence... He denies paying for sex She says she was under-age
A FORMER prostitute claimed last night that the Oxfam boss at the centre of the sex scandal regularly paid to sleep with her.
She said Roland van Hauwermeiren had sex with her twice a week for six months in Haiti – after the 2010 earthquake had destroyed her home and killed five members of her family.
The mother-of-one said the aid worker paid her between £70 and £140 each time, after initially meeting her on the street near his £1,500-a-month hilltop villa known as the Eagle’s Nest.
She claimed she was just 16 – under the Haitian age of sexual consent which is 18 – when they first had sex.
Last night Mr van Hauwermeiren said he was ‘not perfect’ but insisted he never slept with prostitutes in Haiti.
Instead, the 68-year-old said he slept with a ‘mature’ local woman but did not pay her.
The former sex worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said she ‘did not have the means to say no’ because she needed money to feed her baby after the earthquake, which left 220,000 dead and 1.5million people homeless.
Now 23, she did not realise Oxfam was supposed to be helping her country because of the way Mr van Hauwermeiren allegedly behaved towards her.
‘He took advantage of me and he took advantage of the situation,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I feel like he exploited me. I needed money for food and to feed my baby. He could have helped me without paying to have sex with me.
‘Thinking about him now makes me realise he is a sick man. We must have had sex hundreds of times when we were seeing each other.
‘He promised me and my cousin that he was going to take us on holiday to the Dominican Republic and that he was going to get us a job in America.
‘That never happened. He was supposed to be helping but he made the situation worse.’
However, last night Mr van Hauwermeiren, who lives near Ostend in Belgium, broke his silence to deny that he had ever slept with prostitutes when he led Oxfam’s humanitarian response in Haiti for a year and a half.
Last week, The Times claimed that an Oxfam report said that Mr van Hauwermeiren had admitted using prostitutes at the villa rented by the charity.
In an open letter to Belgian broadcaster VTM, he said: ‘I am not perfect, I am not a saint – a man of flesh and blood, and have made mistakes (not easy to admit), and I am deeply ashamed.
‘I admitted to investigators that I had intimate contact three times in my house.
‘It was, in my opinion, a mature honourable lady, not an earthquake victim and no prostitute, whom I met since I supported her young sister and very young mother with diapers and powdered milk. I never gave them money.
‘I have never visited a brothel, nightclub or bar in the city or this country.’
The young woman who spoke to the Mail is one of eight children. She was just 15 when the quake destroyed her family home in January 2010. Desperate and starving, she turned to prostitution as a means of survival.
She became pregnant three months after the quake and claims she first met Mr van Hauwermeiren in January 2011 just before she gave birth.
‘I was 16 when Roland first met me on the street near his home,’ she said. ‘ He was in an Oxfam truck. He spoke a little French, enough for us to communicate.
‘He took a picture of my face and my baby bump and we swapped numbers. A month after the birth of my son in January 2011 he called me up and said he could help me out. He asked me to come over and offered me money for sex. It went on for six months. I would go round twice a week and he would pay me 100 to 200 US dollars a time.
‘As soon as I went round there he would put on a Playboy DVD. Even if he was watching a show he would turn it off and put the DVD on.’
She added that he also used to give her gifts for herself and for her child. ‘He used to bring me clothes for my baby and nappies and he bought me earrings on my birthday.
‘He loved girls coming to his house. He would have girls over from Friday to Monday, four girls a day. Sometimes I had arranged to meet but he was too busy with other girls so would not answer my calls.’
She said that she did not sleep with any other Oxfam staff or aid workers, and never worked as a prostitute again because she was worried about getting a sexually transmitted disease.
The young woman is currently eight months pregnant with her second child. She lives in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince in a small house.
‘In the earthquake I lost five family members,’ she said. ‘Our house collapsed and we had no home. I cried a lot and didn’t feel like we had hope. The worst part is that we could not find the bodies of our family to give them a burial.
‘I was a kid. I was in school but after that I didn’t go any more. We were hit hard and were poorer than before.’
Asked about her hopes for the future, she said: ‘I hope that God blesses my children and that I have enough strength to offer them a better life and a better education than the one I had.
‘If the earthquake hadn’t happened I would have finished high school and become a nurse.’
Mr van Hauwermeiren resigned from his post in Haiti in mid-2011 and was allowed a ‘phased and dignified exit’. Oxfam released a statement in August 2011 saying he had voluntarily stepped down because of staff misconduct.
It did not say what the allegations were about, claiming the matter was confidential. Six other men left Oxfam as a result of the investigation.
Mr van Hauwermeiren has also been accused of using prostitutes while working for Oxfam in Chad in 2006 and when he was working for medical charity Merlin in Liberia in 2004.
Last night he insisted that he
‘He offered me money for sex’
never slept with prostitutes in Haiti, Chad or Liberia. He admitted he was fired from his job in Liberia after attending a party where two prostitutes were present, although he said he had only ‘ danced and flirted’ with them.
Mr van Hauwermeiren said that rumours of aid workers paying for sex in Chad in 2006 were ‘ complete nonsense’. He added: ‘ These allegations are destroying me and I no longer dare to appear in public or speak to my family and children.’
Mr van Hauwermeiren could not be reached for a direct comment last night. An Oxfam spokesman declined to comment.