Islamic scholar to face judge over rape charges
Two women have claimed Ramadan raped them in 2009 and 2012
Prominent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan was to face a French investigating magistrate yesterday after two days of questioning over claims by two women that he raped them in French hotel rooms in 2009 and 2012.
The judge may then formally charge the 55-year-old Oxford professor over the allegations which emerged in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, a judicial source told AFP.
Ramadan, a Swiss citizen whose grandfather founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, was taken into custody on Wednesday as part of a preliminary inquiry in Paris into the rape and assault allegations.
A regular face on French television, he is the most prominent figure to be held in France over the sexual assault and harassment claims that have rippled around the world as a result of the “Me Too” campaign.
Ramadan has denied the separate accusations from the two women.
The first was made by Henda Ayari, a feminist activist. She had described being raped in a book published in 2016, without naming her attacker.
But in October, she said she had decided to name Ramadan publicly as the alleged perpetrator as a result of the “Me Too” campaign, using the French hashtag “Balance Ton Porc” (Expose your pig).
She said Ramadan raped her in his hotel room, telling Le Parisien newspaper: “He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die.”
She lodged a rape complaint against Ramadan 20.
Several days later an unidentified disabled woman, a Muslim convert, also accused the academic of violently raping her in a hotel room in the southeastern city of Lyon in 2009.
Humiliations
on October
Vanity Fair magazine, which met the woman, said her lawsuit against Ramadan described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on.”
During three hours of testimony in Paris on Thursday, the woman — using the pseudonym “Christelle” — recounted her allegations to the judge in Ramadan’s presence.
Rejecting her testimony, the scholar refused to sign the official summary of the account, sources close to the case said.
“Both sides maintained their positions,” one source said.