The Anuradhapura Magistrate’s Court has rejected a request made by a former army soldier, who is a suspect in a sexual assault case involving a female specialist doctor undergoing training at the Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital, seeking permission to make another statement in court.

According to the Ada Derana court reporter, the request was made during the hearing of the case before Anuradhapura Chief Magistrate Nalaka Sanjeewa Jayasuriya.

Responding to the suspect’s request, the Sub Inspector of Police (SI) of the Child and Women’s Bureau of the Anuradhapura Police A.C. Dayananda informed the Magistrate that the suspect was attempting to use the court to make various false statements in a deliberate effort to defame and distress the victimized doctor.

Police further stated that the suspect was intentionally trying to spread these false claims through media to cause emotional harm to the doctor.

Previously, the suspect made a false statement in open court, claiming that the sexual act was not committed by force, according to police.

The Sub Inspector of the Child and Women’s Bureau of the Anuradhapura Police requested court not to allow such malicious and false statements, which waste the court’s time and are made with ill intent.

The court also ordered police to send the smartphone belonging to the doctor—which was recovered by police while the suspect had allegedly hidden it after abducting her—to the government forensic examiner and submit the related forensic report to court.

The former Army soldier, who is currently in remand custody over the incident, has been further remanded until July 29.

Earlier, the Anuradhapura Police had been instructed to present the suspect for a DNA test and submit the medical report to court.

In a further report to court, police indicated that investigations into the crime are still ongoing.

The suspect, a former Army soldier residing in the Galnewa new town, had previously been presented for an identification parade, during which the victimized doctor successfully identified him.

The sister of the suspect linked to the sexual assault of a female doctor at the Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital, along with another individual, has been arrested, police confirmed.

The two suspects, a 37-year-old woman and a 27-year-old man, were taken into custody on Tuesday night (12) in the Nidikumbayaya area of Galnewa.

According to police, the suspect’s sister was arrested on charges of aiding him in evading capture, while the other individual was found in possession of a mobile phone allegedly stolen by the suspect.

Meanwhile, the main suspect, a 34-year-old resident of Galnewa, is set to be produced before the Anuradhapura Magistrate’s Court today (13). 

He was arrested on Wednesday (12) during a joint search operation conducted by Galnewa Police and Anuradhapura Police Special Task Force while hiding in a forested area in Galnewa.

Based on information uncovered during interrogation, police recovered the knife used to threaten the female doctor during the assault. 

The suspect is currently in the custody of Anuradhapura Police as further investigations continue.

Trump himself has long been accused of abusing or mistreating women and once was caught bragging about grabbing women by the genitals. He was found liable by a New York City jury for sexual abuse and defamation and eventually ordered to pay the woman, E. Jean Carroll, $83 million in damages.

Taken together, there are a striking number of incidents in which potential high-ranking government officials in Trump’s second administration face allegations of sexual abuse. Trump and all of his picks for government have denied the claims against them, with some of the people accused arguing the cases are driven by politics.

With six members of the 15-plus member leadership team facing allegations, approximately one-third of the top White House staff have a history of misconduct claims.

Here’s a look at what’s known about the cases:

President-elect Donald Trump

Jurors in New York last year found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, an advice columnist, in 1996.

The verdict was split: Jurors rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped, finding Trump responsible for a lesser degree of sexual abuse. Jurors also found Trump liable for defaming Carroll over her allegations. Trump did not attend the civil trial and was absent when the verdict was read.

Carroll was one of more than a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual assault or harassment. She went public in a 2019 memoir with her allegation that the Republican raped her in the dressing room of a posh Manhattan department store.

Trump denied it, saying he never encountered Carroll at the store and did not know her. He has called her a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell a memoir. He has similarly denied claims by other women.

Pete Hegseth, nominee for secretary of defense

A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public this week.

Hegseth told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing, the report said.

News of the allegations surfaced last week when local officials released a brief statement confirming that a woman had accused Hegseth of sexual assault in October 2017 after he had spoken at a Republican women’s event in Monterey.

Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said in a statement that the police report confirms “what I have said all along that the incident was fully investigated and police found the allegations to be false, which is why no charges were filed.”

Parlatore said a payment was made to the woman as part of a confidential settlement a few years after the police investigation because Hegseth was concerned that she was prepared to file a lawsuit that he feared could have resulted in him being fired from Fox News, where he was a popular host. Parlatore would not reveal the amount of the payment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominee for secretary of health and human services

A woman who babysat for Kennedy and his second wife told Vanity Fair magazine that he groped her in the late 1990s, when she was 23. Kennedy did not deny the allegation, telling a podcast: “I had a very, very rambunctious youth.” He texted the woman an apology after the story was published.

According to an interview the woman gave this week with USA Today, she said she was babysitting for his children at Kennedy’s home in Mount Kisco, New York. She said that the assault happened soon after she began working there. During a kitchen table meeting with Kennedy and another person, she said she felt him rubbing her leg under the table.

She told the newspaper that another time, Kennedy, then 46, asked her to rub lotion on him when he was shirtless and she obliged because she wanted to get it over with. And he grabbed her in a kitchen pantry and groped her, blocking her exit. She stayed on the job for a few more months before leaving.

Linda McMahon, nominee for secretary of education

A lawsuit filed last month alleges that McMahon knowingly enabled sexual exploitation of children by a World Wrestling Entertainment employee as early as the 1980s. She denies the allegations.

The suit was filed in October in Maryland, where a recent law change eliminated the state’s statute of limitations for child sex abuse claims, opening the doors for victims to sue regardless of their age or how much time has passed.

The complaint alleges that Melvin Phillips, who died in 2012, would target young men from disadvantaged backgrounds and hire them as “ring boys” to help with the preparations for wrestling matches. Phillips would then assault them in his dressing room, hotels and even in the wrestlers’ locker room, according to the complaint, which was filed on behalf of five men.

The abuse detailed in the lawsuit occurred over several years during Phillips’ long tenure with the organization spanning from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Because of his death, Phillips is not among the named defendants.

Instead, the complaint targets WWE founders Linda McMahon and her husband Vince, who grew the organization into the powerhouse it is today. The couple was well aware of Phillips’ brazen misconduct but did little to stop him, according to the complaint.

“This civil lawsuit based upon thirty-plus year-old allegations is filled with scurrilous lies, exaggerations, and misrepresentations regarding Linda McMahon,” said Laura Brevetti, Linda McMahon’s lawyer, in a statement. “The matter at the time was investigated by company attorneys and the FBI, which found no grounds to continue the investigation. Ms. McMahon will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit and without doubt ultimately succeed.”

Brevetti confirmed Linda and Vince McMahon are separated.

Elon Musk, Trump’s choice to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency

Tesla and SpaceXCEO Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a flight attendant contracted by SpaceX who worked on his private jet in 2016. He denied the claim.

A 2022 report by Business Insider said SpaceX paid the woman $250,000 in severance in 2018 in exchange for her agreeing not to file a lawsuit over her claim.

The Business Insider report was based on an account by the flight attendant’s friend, who said the flight attendant told her about the incident shortly after it happened. The report also said the flight attendant was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits her from discussing the payment or anything else about Musk and SpaceX.

SpaceX didn’t respond to emails seeking comment Friday.

Musk responded to the allegations on Twitter, which he was in the process of buying at the time they surfaced.

“And, for the record, those wild accusations are utterly untrue,” he wrote in response to one user who tweeted in support of him.

He replied to another: “In my 30 year career, including the entire MeToo era, there’s nothing to report, but, as soon as I say I intend to restore free speech to Twitter & vote Republican, suddenly there is …”

Matt Gaetz, who withdrew as Trump’s choice for attorney general

The former Florida congressman was embroiled in a sex trafficking investigation by the Justice Department he had been tapped to lead. He also was under scrutiny by the House Ethics Committee over allegations including sexual misconduct — until he resigned from Congress this week. He then withdrew his name for consideration.

Gaetz has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and said last year that the Justice Department’s investigation into sex trafficking allegations involving underage girls had ended with no federal charges against him.

Federal investigators scrutinized a trip that Gaetz took to the Bahamas with a group of women and a doctor who donated to his campaign, and whether the women were paid or received gifts to have sex with the men, according to people familiar with the matter who were not allowed to publicly discuss the investigation.

Two women House investigators that Gaetz paid them for sex and one of the women testified she saw him having sex with a 17-year-old, according to an attorney for the women.

The committee began its review of Gaetz in April 2021, deferred its work in response to a Justice Department request, and renewed its work shortly after Gaetz announced that the Justice Department had ended a sex trafficking investigation.

___

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

An Associated Press investigation found Donald Asquith’s alleged assault last year happened just days after the CIA promised to crack down on sexual misconduct in its ranks — even as the agency has refused to disclose details on the extent of the problem. A recent 648-page internal watchdog report that found systemic shortcomings in the CIA’s handling of such complaints was classified as “secret,” shielded as a potential threat to national security.

“It is inconceivable that sexual misconduct could be considered a state secret,” said Kevin Carroll, an attorney who represents several women in the agency who have made complaints.

The watchdog report followed an earlier AP investigation that found at least two dozen women in the CIA came forward to authorities and Congress with accounts of sexual assaults, unwanted touching and what they described as a campaign to silence them.

Many were emboldened by a CIA officer trainee who went to police in 2022 after the agency failed to take action against a colleague she accused of assaulting her with a scarf in a stairwell at CIA headquarters. Some of those women now say they have faced retaliation, including the victim of the stairwell attack, who was terminated less than six months after suing the agency.

“I believed in the institution implicitly and I also believed all of the things the agency said it was doing to rectify what I saw as an epidemic,” said one of those women, who was not named because the AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault. “I realize now that was just lip service.”

Asquith’s case could prove even more embarrassing to the CIA given his lengthy clandestine service overseas and the brazenness of the alleged conduct. It also happened in June 2023, less than a month after CIA Director William Burns announced sweeping reforms intended to keep women safe, streamline claims and more quickly discipline offenders. “We must get this right,” he said.

Asquith was charged in April in suburban Washington’s Loudoun County, Virginia, with misdemeanor assault and battery following a monthslong sheriff’s probe into the boozy party in an off-site CIA office attended by at least a dozen people.

His accuser, a CIA contractor, told authorities that she repeatedly rebuffed Asquith’s advances but that he kept pulling closer, rubbing her leg without her consent and making a series of inappropriate sexual comments, as well as “grunting noises and thrusting motions.”

Asquith then “placed his hand up her skirt to her thigh numerous times causing her skirt to lift up, possibly exposing her underwear,” said court documents.

The woman told investigators she slapped Asquith’s hand away and got up to leave, but that he intervened as she approached the door and asked for a “booby hug” before grabbing her with both hands around her back and rubbing his groin and chest on her. She said Asquith then “forcibly hugged her and kissed all over her face and mouth without her consent.”

Asquith did not respond to repeated requests for comment. His lawyer, Jon Katz, hung up when called by the AP.

“CIA takes allegations of sexual assault and harassment extremely seriously,” the agency said in a statement, adding that within days of the incident it restricted Asquith’s contact with the alleged victim and he retired three months later.

Asquith’s case comes amid a flurry of activity surrounding sexual misconduct accusations at the CIA, including ongoing state and federal criminal investigations into an undercover officer in Europe suspected of knowingly infecting at least three CIA colleagues with an incurable sexually transmitted disease. The agency has not explained why that officer remains overseas.

Just a week before Asquith’s trial begins this month, a federal judge in Washington will sentence another former CIA officer who drugged and sexually abused at least two dozen women he met on Tinder and other dating apps. Prosecutors are seeking a 30-year sentence for Brian Jeffrey Raymond, calling him a serial predator who caused “immeasurable” harm during various overseas postings between 2006 and 2020.

And next month, a now-former CIA officer trainee faces a second trial on charges stemming from the 2022 stairwell attack in the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Ashkan Bayatpour has admitted wrapping a scarf around the woman’s neck but says it was intended as a joke. The woman says it was an attack in which he also attempted to kiss her against her will.

“He made a face like he was trying to really hurt me,” the woman testified last year during a bench trial in which Bayatpour was convicted of misdemeanor assault and battery. Under Virginia law, the former Navy intelligence officer is entitled to a jury trial after appealing that conviction.

Former CIA case officer Lindsay Moran, author of a 2005 memoir on her life as a spy, said sexual misconduct has long been a problem in the male-dominated agency and became worse after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the agency’s focus shifted to deploying clandestine combat units to Afghanistan and Iraq.

“They brought their own brand of male toxicity that was like gasoline on the old-boys network that already existed,” Moran said. “National security is used as an excuse to brush these concerns under the carpet.”

When asked why the watchdog report was classified, keeping secret an accounting of the problem and case histories, CIA said that decision was made by its inspector general, which conducted the inquiry and did not respond to a request for comment.

Also, the CIA has yet to fulfill AP’s longstanding Freedom of Information Act request seeking internal records detailing its response to the Raymond scandal, and why it took so long to uncover assaults he documented in nearly 500 videos and photos that in some instances showed him groping or straddling naked, unconscious victims.

Florida Republican Marco Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told AP that lawmakers will continue to “hold agency leaders accountable” after pushing for reforms in the CIA’s misconduct reporting process.

“How far does someone have to go before the agency will step in and say enough is enough?” Barbara Gray, a former CIA officer, told AP last year after making an internal complaint accusing her manager of getting into her hotel bed as she slept during a work trip.

CIA assured Gray the supervisor was being “appropriately punished,” she said, but then promoted him and featured him in a career development video shown to junior officers. Gray, meanwhile, resigned after her career “seemed to grind to a halt.”

“What culture is CIA nurturing when it promotes some of its most egregious offenders?” she said. “I believe the agency is making an effort to improve its reporting processes and procedures, but my question is: What comes next?”

Speaking on Wednesday night on TV channel France 5, Macron described himself as a “big admirer” of a “great actor.” Macron added: “He makes France proud.”

Macron’s comments in a televised interview come after a documentary that aired earlier this month said 16 women have accused Depardieu of harassing, groping or sexually assaulting them. The France-2 report also showed the actor making obscene remarks and gestures during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

They also come as a Spanish journalist and writer recently filed a complaint against Depardieu, who she says sexually abused her during an interview in Paris in 1995, Spanish police said Thursday.

Asked about such accusations against Depardieu, Macron said he believed in the presumption of innocence and the judicial process. “You will never see me participate in a manhunt,” the French leader said.

Macron also criticized his culture minister’s decision to launch a disciplinary procedure concerning Depardieu’s prestigious Order of the Legion of Honor, which could lead to the award getting rescinded. He said Culture Minister Rima Abdul-Malak went “a bit too far.”

The Legion of Honor is not “a moral tool” and should not be removed “based on a documentary,” Macron said.

Depardieu, 74, was put under investigation in December 2020 for alleged rape and sexual assault following allegations in 2018 from actor Charlotte Arnould, who said the crimes took place at Depardieu’s home. The investigation is ongoing.

Another alleged victim emerged in Spain, journalist and writer Ruth Baza who filed a complaint last week in the southern city of Torremolinos that the Spanish police said will now be shared with French authorities.

Baza, 51, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday that when she was 23, she interviewed the actor in Paris for the magazine Cinemanía. She said that in her police complaint she explained how at the end of the interview the actor started kissing her face and neck, and touched her between her legs, behavior she said that police have classified as rape.

Baza said she felt “truly paralyzed” by Depardieu. “I was trapped.”

Baza said she had buried the matter in her mind but wrote it all down in detail in her diary at the time. She said the whole episode flooded back last April when she read about accusations made by 13 women against Depardieu.

She said that since then she has been in “a true nightmare” and decided she had to speak out.

“Taking the decision to go to the police has been the very last decision to try to go on with my life and leave this story in the hands of others and just try to help others who are in my very same situation and who are not able to talk,” Baza said.

She said that she has every intention of testifying to French authorities if needed.

Another complaint was filed in France in September by comedian Helene Darras for alleged sexual assault. Darras accused Depardieu of touching her bottom when she was a young extra for the 2008 film “Disco.”

Women rights activists on Thursday vigorously denounced Macron’s comments.

Michelle Dayan, president of Lawyers 4 Women, said that as a lawyer and a citizen, she also believed strongly in the presumption of innocence. “Yet it mustn’t be used as a pretext not to listen to women who say they are victims of abuses,” she said.

Speaking on France Info news broadcaster, Dayan said “violence against women starts there … in the image of women that is conveyed” through Depardieu’s shocking remarks.

Activist group Osez le feminisme denounced on X, formerly Twitter, “one more confirmation that, definitively, Emmanuel Macron doesn’t live in the same world as us.”

“We, the prey, are facing a man (Depardieu) who describes himself as a ‘great hunter,’ yet who, in the words of the president, becomes the victim of a ‘manhunt,’” the group posted.

Anne-Cécile Mailfert, president of the Women’s Foundation, said on BFM TV that Macron’s comments were “very serious” because “he is judging women who filed a complaint, women who spoke out. … He’s taking sides.”

Former French President Francois Hollande also chimed in to counter his successor. “No, we are not proud,” Hollande said on the France Inter radio network.

What was expected from the president was to “speak about women” who see in Depardieu’s remarks “violence, domination and contempt,” he said.

In October, Depardieu published an open letter in the French newspaper Le Figaro that said, “I want to tell you the truth. I have never, ever abused a woman.”

___

Associated Press writer Ciaran Giles in Madrid contributed to this report.

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CNN
 — 

Brazilian football player Dani Alves is under investigation for an alleged sexual assault that took place in Barcelona last month, the Catalonia Higher Court of Justice confirmed on Tuesday.

“Barcelona investigating magistrate’s court number 15 has opened proceedings for an alleged crime of sexual assault due to a complaint presented by a woman against a football player for events that allegedly occurred at a Barcelona nightclub this past month of December,” the court’s statement reads.

“The matter is in the investigative phase and at this time we do not have more information.”

A spokesperson for the court confirmed to CNN the allegations concern Dani Alves.

CNN reached out to Mexico’s UNAM, Alves’ current club, for comment from the team and player but did not immediately hear back. Alves denies any wrongdoing, per Reuters.

Alves is one of the most decorated football players of his generation, having won domestic titles in Spain, Italy and France. He also won three Champions League titles with Barcelona.

Alves won the Copa America with Brazil in 2007 and 2019. At 39 years old, he became Brazil’s oldest player to feature at the World Cup while appearing for the national team in Qatar when his team played Cameroon.