“Perpetrators of abuse often use humiliation, shame and fear to induce silence,” the women’s attorney Van Frish said. “It’s unfortunate that Mr. Al-Saud’s criminal defense attorney publicly accused our clients of a “shakedown” and fabricating their horrifying experience. Our clients refuse to allow Mr. Al-Saud or his attorneys to humiliate them and publicly shame them into silence.”
October 30, 2015
"I am a prince and I do what I want! You are nobody!"
Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud allegedly yelled at 3 female servants in his mansion near Beverly Hills.
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48 comments:
At first I thought it was our Dear Leader talking.
This is bad news when merit review time comes.
That probably flies in Saudi Arabia. Welcome to America, Mr. Prince!
This guy was allowed to go back to Saudi Arabia, right? I am waiting for a republican candidate to go hard against the common aspects of War on Terror by both Bush and Obama. One of those is that Saudi Arabia is an ally. Bush kissed a Saudi prince, Obama bows to them. This prince should be in prison in LA and if guilty of slavery, hanged.
Saudi version of "Do you know who I am?"
Many, many years ago I tried a divorce case where the husband kept telling the Judge that "this is the way we do things in Greece" (where he was from). Finally, the Judge told him, "Well, here in the US we don't punch our wives in the face and send them to ICU." The guy NEVER got the point. Never. And he didn't get anything else either.
Very revealing about the Saudi government.
It flies in America too, very often. Case in point: Vincent Foster.
(of course there, there was diplomatic immunity. But Saudi royal princes think they all have diplomatic immunity, and sometimes they get it retroactively.)
Error on the side of caution. Send the Prince to Moose Lake.
Saudi Arabia just bombed a Doctors without Borders hospital (in Yemen)
There is mostly silence from the Obama Administration.
I do not go to foreign countries and proceed to act like I can do whatever I did the U.S. Yet, so many people come here and expect to act like they would in their own countries, regardless of U.S. law. Saudis are allies, they are not friends. We need a president that understands the difference.
Kill him.
I really don't appreciate princes, Saudi or otherwise. Send them all to Moose Lake.
Except Prince the musician. He's OK.
You know, if I had an employer who yelled at me and threatened to kill me, I would quit.
Unless, of course, he was paying me a lot of money. I can endure a lot of abuse if my paycheck is fat enough.
I prefer the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Kill murderers. Kill them quickly and first. Don't let's get confused about who's killing.
Scott said...
"You know, if I had an employer who yelled at me and threatened to kill me, I would quit."
Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine.
But at the same time, let's not miss an opportunity to send a Saudi prince to Moose Lake or in some other way do our best as a society to make his life miserable....is all I'm saying.
use humiliation, shame and fear to induce silence
Oh, the irony. The LA Times needs to practice introspection.
I had no idea they were still called "servants" in this country.
This is difficult for non-muslims to understand. Lying is OK in that cult. Threatening with power is OK in that cult.
Islam is a cult filled with murder and hate.
Unfortunately for the prince, he's not a lovable rogue like Bill Clinton.
Islam is a religion of murder.
Can we not deport a prince?
The Professor will not say Islam is a murderous religion, even though it's obvious.
Why will that not happen?
The Professor's street address is probably pretty easy to find. I haven't tried, but c'mon, that couldn't be tough.
Islam has terrified the West. We are afraid of 13-year-old boys wearing dynamite vests.
George W. Bush said it was a religion of peace. No, it's not. It's a cult of violence. Grow up, folks.
This murderous cult will tear across the West as Genghis Khan tore across it a thousand years ago. Wake up!
And commenters here will not say that Islam might be, hey, hmm...could be a murderous, sycophantic, horrible cult.
These commenters are too weak to tell the truth. Oh, some Palestinian might come and blow himself up next to me.
"Listen, you're in MY house!"
- Barack al-Saud
"Servants"? Wtf? Employees.
Are the employees American?
"The women, who were identified only as Jane Does in court filings, said they were held against their will and forced to work for Al-Saud as he assaulted, sexually harassed and belittled them in front of guests and other employees." - from the linked article
"Frish said his clients’ ordeal ended when someone called the police after hearing a woman unrelated to the case screaming as she she tried to scale the wall of the property. The prince was arrested for allegedly trying to force that woman to perform oral sex on him." - from the Guardian (yeah, I know, the Guardian)
You can't "quit" if you're being forcibly held against your will, and that's what the women say happened to them.
In many of these cases, the victims are servants brought from Saudi Arabia. So these women might or might not be American.
"I had no idea they were still called "servants" in this country."
That was my word choice. The LA Times called them "workers."
What's wrong with "servants"? If something is wrong with it, then we shouldn't have switched to calling waiters and waitresses "servers."
"Servants" seems like the right word for people who occupy the servants' quarters within a house, especially when the reference is to a big estate with a lot of personnel serving a rich person, a person who might say things like this prince did.
From the OED, there's this historical context that might explain an aversion to the word:
b. In the North American colonies in the 17–18th c., and subsequently in the United States, servant was the usual designation for a slave.
1643 in W. W. Hening Statutes at Large: Coll. Laws Virginia (1823) I. 253 If any such runnaway servants or hired freemen shall produce a certificate [etc.].
1784 Acts & Laws of Connecticut (1784) 103 Apprentices under Age and Servants bought for Time excepted.
1809 E. A. Kendall Trav. Northern Parts U.S. II. 272 Servant, in the statute book of Connecticut..is put for slave.
1852 H. B. Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin II. xxii. 67 Why don't we teach our servants to read?
"Servants" indicates a class difference because "servants" don't work for employers, like employees, "servants" work for "Masters" and do so at the Master's will, whim and decree, not as a matter of freely entered agreements of providing a good or service for pay.
A servant can't complain. An employee can.
**Not to confuse "servant" with server, i.e., a non-sexualized term for waiter or waitress.
That probably flies in Saudi Arabia. Welcome to America, Mr. Prince!
Yeah, here you have to be a Clinton or a Kennedy to get away with that sort of thing. Mere royalty doesn't cut it.
The WASP culture brought here to New England has always been against an arrogant Aristocracy protected by a King's military power to murder people. In its place they support public education and individual freedoms.
The rest of the World still just doesn't get it. And Arabs literally despise it.
The day the Arabs run out of oil wealth developed by us and handed over to them is the day they revert to being Bedouin camel herders and thieves that they are underneath now.
I hope no one takes occasion to use this as an excuse to negatively stereotype princes. The manners of the Hapsburgs were impeccable. The Hohenzollerns were sometimes a bit rambunctious, but nothing off the scale. The Bourbons were famous for the kindness and consideration with which they treated scullery maids.
The manners of the Hapsburgs may have been impeccable, but their lips and jaws were lamentable, and their drool predictable.
When I was in Arabia I had a "Kings Pass". This is a card you show the gate guards to go into the royal gate of the Air Base. Not everyone can go through the royal gate, and the gate guards are different from the conscripts at the main gate.
When I drove up to the gate, the guard looked at my badge, and almost every time they let me know by expression how wrong this was. A foreigner with a Kings Pass was just too much to bear.
My sponsor told me to never speak to the guards, and never give them anything. They are your servants. If I broke this rule, the card would be confiscated. I wondered how anyone would know if I spoke or gave anything to the guards??
The guards will merely phone the headquarters and you will be escorted off the base.
So anyway, I never smiled, I never said a word, and the guard was like daring me to say something. Nope, you are my servant.
Oh, a muslim?
Not. A. Problem.
Thank goodness it wasn't an icky Christian.
The second-to-worst government in the entire world is the government of Saudi Arabia.
The very worst government in the entire world is whatever replaces it.
Peter
In United States history, "servants" are associated with "indentured servitude," which is the way many people in the early days paid for their crossing from Europe. It's "slavery lite" and probably gets its negative connotation from that.
Coupe: Interesting story. My father took NASA aircraft into Saudi Arabia once or twice, on airborne sciences missions. After one trip (late 60s or early 70s) he related a story how, one morning, they arrived at the airport (I believe this was Riyadh International) only to find that the plane was surrounded by armed Saudi soldiers. Now, they had been officially invited "by the king" as was required for such a government agency visit, so this was unexpected. He never did get to the bottom of it - I wonder if one of the crew or scientists had violated some bit of protocol, as in your account.
At the time, his own theory was that someone had "informed" the local commander that the NASA mission was actually a CIA front. They were suspected of that fairly often, in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Fred: We always had to go through customs on arrival, and they inspected our stuff closely. A Sears catalog with women's underwear was considered porn. Do not collect $200... Same with religious material. Maybe the advance team screwed up :-)
I don't know though, they were an unusual people, and I never quite melded culture-wise. I just tried to look official at all times and speak directly. Arab royalty will stare you down when they are speaking, so I tried to follow that rule.
If they feel you have slighted them, say by watching a woman eating a sugar doughnut while he is addressing you, is apt to turn ugly fast.
"At the time, his own theory was that someone had "informed" the local commander that the NASA mission was actually a CIA front. They were suspected of that fairly often, in Latin America and Eastern Europe."
Often for good reason.
"A servant can't complain. An employee can."
By that definition, we're a nation with lots of servants in it.
"often for good reason"
Good reason or not, they often sure LOOKED suspicious.
One mission was testing side-looking synthetic aperture radar, for mapping. They were in Central America, Guatemala IIRC. (With the national government's permission, of course, for whatever that was worth. The stated reason for their permission was that they believed the radar, which penetrated about 10cm into the soil surface, might reveal new archaeological sites.)
As part of this mission they had to go into many parts of the countryside to set up large "corner reflectors" made of 4x8 foot sheets of plywood and aluminum foil, to mark known geographic points.
You can imagine the opinions of the various factions on the ground to that activity. CIA, UFO, weather control, invasion, etc. etc. There was no end of conspiracy theories.
Flying over Antarctica looking at ozone did not seem to arouse the locals quite so much...
Fred Drinkwater: I flew missions off the coast of El Salvador. We actually used the Nicaragua VOR to set our orbit, ha. We had modified a radar so it could see real slow moving targets, because the Sandinista's were supposedly smuggling arms to the rebels using slow little planes, and the radar was set up to only see targets over about 80 knots.
All of a sudden we could see all sorts of activity. Wait a minute. Crap, we were seeing all the cars on the highway! ha. Course at 3 am in the morning it might be just one or two cars, so it was neat to watch them go along the road. Keep you from falling asleep. We'd run helicopters in and intercept the Toyota...
I think we spent a billion dollars flying 24/7 and never did see an air drop. Reagan wanted proof, after he already gave the speech, but we found no proof, and it turns out the Sandinista's had plenty of small boats to smuggle arms, they didn't need no stinking airplane. Ollie North and Reagan were highly pissed.
VOR? Pfft. What was the problem, Google Maps didn't work on your touch-tone phone? (Oh, wait...)
My father used to carry an actual ASTROGATOR on over-ocean missions, and the CV-990 had a little perspex dome in the top so he could shoot stars with a goddamn sextant.
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