Month: November 2017

When celebrated Indian fashion designer Wendell Rodricks sat down to write his third book, haute couture was not on his mind.

He was thinking about his neighbor Rosa — an elderly woman who had lived her life as a poskem — adopted as a child by a wealthy family in the western Indian state of Goa, given their family name but condemned to a lifetime of domestic servitude.

Rodricks’ new novel, “Poskem: Goans In The Shadows,” is a fictional tale of four people caught up in a Goan tradition that finally appears to be dying out in the 21st century.

Rodricks writes of an unspoken world of the last generation of people who fell victim to the poskem tradition, preserving their story for posterity, the publisher’s note states.

The author, a Goan himself, describes it as “the sunshine state’s dark secret.”

“The worst part of being a poskem… was that the entire village knew of these people and did not treat them with respect,” Rodricks told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Alda, the protagonist of the book inspired by the real-life Rosa, discovers she is different from the other children in the house when she is 10.

While her six “siblings” went to school, she did household chores, and while they ate from porcelain plates, she ate in the kitchen with the servants.

“Poskem has so many emotions — incest, sodomy, rape, seduction, love, hate, murder. But all this happened in reality,” Rodricks said at the book’s launch in India’s southern city of Chennai.

India’s 2011 census recorded more than 4 million laborers aged from five to 14 years old.

In Goa, one of India’s top tourist destinations, poskem were normally from poor families or illegitimate children, Rodricks said.

“They were taken into a family, given the family name, introduced to a religion but, for the most part, not given equal treatment like the other siblings in the house,” he said.

“Very often they had no right to property and were even selfishly denied marriage so that the family could keep them in lifelong servitude.”

Rodricks said his mother’s family had a poskem, but he did not know the meaning of the word when he was young. He first understood what it meant in his twenties and later got to know more when he settled down in Goa and Rosa was his neighbor.

“The book is an apology to all the men and women who lived their lives as poskem in a 200-year-old tradition that has been rarely questioned,” he said.
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Travel blogger Mikah Meyer takes us on a ferry ride to San Juan National State Park in Washington state.
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Armed with signs, catchy phrases and a motivation to take #MeToo beyond the internet and into real life, a few hundred women, men and children gathered Sunday among the sex shops and tourist traps of Hollywood Boulevard to protest sexual harassment.

 

The Take Back the Workplace March and the #MeToo Survivors March joined forces in the heart of Hollywood, near the entrance to the Dolby Theater where the Academy Awards take place. They walked side by side past the tourists, costume shops, strip clubs and a man wearing a “Whiskey Made Me Do It” T-shirt to gather for a rally of rousing speeches from the likes of Harvey Weinstein accuser Lauren Sivan and Oscar-winning producer Cathy Schulman.

 

“Not in pots, not in plants, keep your junk inside your pants,” the crowd chanted for a few minutes, before shifting gears to: “Harvey Weinstein is a joke, women workers just got woke.”

 

Other chants included, “Survivors united, we’ll never be divided” and “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no.’ ”

 

Some came with their families, some came with friends and attendees ranged in age from 4 to over 68. Aislinn Russell, a 15-year-old Los Angeles high school student came with two peers and signs railing against terms like “friend zone” and “slut.”

 

“Seeing the #metoo movement growing and seeing all these people telling their stories, I have my own stories too,” Russell said. “I want to join in with that and not be silent with everything going on.”

 

Her sign, drawn in pink and purple block letters read: ” ‘Slut’ is attacking women for their right to say yes.” Her friend’s read: ” ‘Friend Zone’ is attacking women for their right to say no.”

 

Another attendee, Nancy Allen, a 52-year-old woman from Los Angeles, carried a sign that read, “I was 7.”

 

“We’ve been silent too long,” Allen said. “A lot of people have kept this inside us for years and years.”

 

Howard Kim, a 68-year-old Los Angeles resident, came out to support the march.

 

“I’m just a little sorry there aren’t more people out here,” Kim said. “I was hoping there would be.”

Event organizers estimated there were about 200 to 300 attendees. But they also acknowledged that it was “difficult to tell” with the normal Hollywood Boulevard crowds.

 

The crowd walked about a mile to the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Cole, the site of CNN headquarters, where a podium was set up for the Take Back the Workplace rally.

 

Sivan, a TV journalist who alleged sexual harassment from Weinstein and served as the “celebrity chair” of the Take Back the Workplace event, said that the time is ripe for a re-ordering of power.

 

“We want our daughters and sons to be able to go to a workplace and never have to take a meeting with a dude in a bathrobe,” Sivan said. “They will never have to choose to put out or keep their job.”

 

Schulman, who presides over the advocacy group Women in Film, told the crowd that the sexual harassment problem can’t be fixed by just weeding out sex criminals. Women, she said, have to be protected from prejudice and abuse. Schulman called for diversifying workplaces and reforming human resources departments.

 

Although there were not many celebrity attendees on site, some supported the marches from afar.

 

“To all my sisters and brothers out there marching today in L.A Sending you love and support from thousands of miles away!” said Patricia Arquette on Twitter Sunday.

 

Claire Forlani, another Weinstein accuser, also tweeted: “To the women and men marching in Hollywood today #metoomarch I am there in spirit. #Solidarity”

The peaceful demonstration had an air of melancholy too. While there was solidarity, fear of retaliation persisted.

 

One woman, who did not want to give her name for fear of retaliation or lawsuit carried a homemade sign accusing a sitcom producer of grabbing her from behind and making a lewd remark and suggestive comment.

 

“Thank you to my agent at William Morris for telling me ‘Keep your mouth shut or you’ll never work again,’ ” read the other side of the sign. “BTW, you also represented my abuser.”

 

Schulman said she is hopeful, however. Her organization on Thursday announced that it is setting up a sexual harassment hotline where victims can call for pro-bono legal counseling and advice. The hotline is expected to be operational by Dec. 1.

 

“I’ve experienced gender bias, salary imparity. I’ve been yelled at, disrespected. I’ve had credit taken from me, I’ve had money stolen from me. I’ve been bankrupted twice and much worse. And I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen every bit of harassment and every bit of these sex crimes. However, I’ve produced 20 movies, I’ve supervised over 150 movies, I’ve won an Academy Award. I’ve even raised a 17-year-old daughter,” Schulman said. “Do not let them destroy us. We can win this war. It’s a game. It’s a game of power that we can win.”
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It takes more than a red suit and a white beard to be a good Santa Claus. That’s an important lesson taught at the longest continuously running Santa Claus school in the world.

Charlie W. Howard, who was the featured Santa Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for 17 years, started the school in 1937. 

Tom Valent, now the school’s dean, says there was a great need for good Santas at that time. 

“Santas did not portray the image that we want,” Valent said. “Santa Claus stands for all good things and some of the gentlemen that were portraying that image were not up to par then.”

​Santa always learning

Today’s Santas really do not have that problem. They attend the three-day workshop at the C.W. Howard Santa Claus School for a variety of other reasons, such as learning Santa sign language, facts about reindeer and how to do proper dress and makeup. They also become familiar with the newest wish list toys, gain interview experience for radio and TV and get tips for managing their business taxes.

Robert Davis, who has played Santa for 30 years, has attended the school several times. 

“No matter how good you are at whatever you choose to do, you can always be better,” he said. “Not only does the school teach you so much, but when you interact with 250 people who love the same thing you do, you learn something new every year.”

Although Howard opened the school in his home town of Albion, New York, today, the Santas’ headquarters is the Santa House, which sits near the center of town in Midland, Michigan.

Valent designed the gingerbread style house, which features a traditional cuckoo clock with animated dancers, in 1986. He also hand-carved the hundreds of displays inside, from animated elves painting toys and playing a piano, to a candy conveyor line, and a giant Santa chair.

Thousands of Santa’s cousins

No one knows exactly how many Santas have graduated from the school, but conservative estimates place the number around 15,000. 

During that time, there have been students from North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. This year the school has Santas from all 50 states, and also 20 from Canada, three from Denmark, one from New Zealand, and one from Norway.

The Santas never claim to be the one and only real Santa, but rather “the spirit of Christmas.” At the school’s opening night Santa Walk, they tell visiting children they are the “cousins of Santa.”

Robert Davis says they also never promise anything, instead saying they will “try their best.” 

“Anywhere I go, I try to make my contact and exchange with that child the very best that it can be because that could be that child’s best five minutes of the year,” he said.

After all, as founder Charles W. Howard was fond of saying, “He errs who thinks Santa enters through the chimney. Santa enters through the heart.”
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For more than a century she was known as the woman behind the throne, the empress who through skill and circumstance rose from lowly imperial consort to iron-fisted ruler of China at a time and in a place when women were believed to have no power at all.

But it turns out Empress Dowager Cixi was much more than that. The 19th century ruler, who consolidated authority through political maneuvering that at times included incarceration and assassination, was also a serious arts patron and even an artist herself, with discerning tastes that helped set the style for traditional Asian art for more than a century.

That side of Cixi comes to the Western world for the first time with Sunday’s unveiling of “Empress Dowager, Cixi: Selections From the Summer Palace” at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. The wide-ranging collection, never before seen outside China, will remain at the Southern California museum through March 11 before returning to Beijing.

Wide-ranging collection

Consisting of more than 100 pieces from the lavish Beijing palace Cixi called home during the final years of her life, “Empress Dowager” includes numerous examples of intricately designed Chinese furniture, porcelain vases and stone carvings, as well as several pieces of Western art, rare in China at the time, that she also collected. Among them are a large oil-on-canvas portrait of herself she commissioned the prominent Dutch artist Hubert Vos to create.

Other Western accoutrements include gifts from visiting dignitaries, among them British silver serving sets, German and Swiss clocks, and a marble-topped table from Italy with inlaid stones in the shape of a chessboard.

This is even an American-built luxury automobile. The 1901 Duryea touring car, is believed to be the first automobile imported into China and as such may have involved the empress in the country’s first automobile accident when her driver is said to have hit a pedestrian.

“We already have a lot of scholarship on who she is and how she ruled China. But this show brings you a different angle,” said exhibition curator Ying-Chen Peng, as she led a recent pre-opening tour of it through the museum that was kicked off by a raucous performance of Chinese lion dancers accompanied by musicians loudly banging gongs cymbals and drums.

Through art, not politics

“This exhibition seeks to introduce you to this woman as an arts patron, as an architect, as a designer,” the American University art historian said.

That’s an approach that may finally have gotten it to the Western world. Anne Shih, who chairs the museum’s board of directors, noted recently that she spent 10 years trying to persuade the Chinese government to lend Cixi’s art.

The Bowers has built an impressive international reputation over the years by hosting exhibitions of priceless, historical, often larger-than-life artworks from Tibet, the Silk Road, the tomb of China’s first emperor and other historic sites.

However, Shih says the Chinese government turned her down repeatedly. Officials told her the empress, who outlived two much younger emperors, including one who died mysteriously of arsenic poisoning, was just too controversial. She’s been portrayed in numerous films and books and not always positively.

Shih finally prevailed, however, when she emphasized this show would focus on art, not politics.

​A passion for art

Although it does, it still becomes apparent to visitors what a formidable presence Cixi must have been as they enter a recreation of her throne room to be greeted by a larger-than-life portrait of her covered in jewels and razor-sharp fingernail protectors as she glares ominously at her audience.

Nearby, however, are objects that quickly make her passion for art clear. Prominent among them is a towering calligraphy work of black ink embossed on a sheet of paper that, stretching to about 6 feet (2 meters), is taller than the dowager was. She is said to have made it by wielding a large heavy brush while standing on a stool as some of the eunuchs who served her stretched out the paper.

Not far away are ink-and-paper drawings of flowers the empress also created, although Peng notes that when it came to painting, Cixi was a much better calligrapher.

Placed into the emperor’s harem as a low-level teenage consort, she quickly elevated her status by giving birth to his only son in 1856. When the emperor died six years later she installed the boy as his successor and, as the woman behind the throne, ousted opponents, brought in loyalists and ran the country herself for the next 43 years. She died in 1908 at age 72.

Although she led her country through numerous wars launched by foreign invaders during those years, she also found time to visit with dignitaries from other countries and to pursue her own passion for art.

Her real artistic skill, however, lay not in making art but in envisioning works that would stand the critical test of time and then finding skilled artisans to create them.

“Her personal preference actually led to the further development of these very ornate designs,” Peng said, observing some of the intricately carved, gold-inlaid furniture and hand-painted porcelain objects. “Nowadays when you go to antique shops, you can see quite a few pieces in this style. You can say she was a trendsetter.”
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What is the only Da Vinci painting on the open market worth? A Russian billionaire believes he was swindled when he bought it for $127.5 million. This week he’ll find out if he was right.

“Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Jesus Christ by the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci circa 1500, is the star lot in New York’s November art auctions that will see Christie’s and Sotheby’s chase combined art sales of more than $1 billion.

It goes under the hammer at Christie’s on Wednesday evening, something of an incongruous lot in the postwar and contemporary sale, which attracts the biggest spenders in the high-octane world of international billionaire art collectors.

The auction house, which declines to comment on the controversy and identifies the seller only as a European collector, has valued the painting at $100 million.

“Look at the painting, it is an extraordinary work of art,” said Francois de Poortere, head of the old masters department at Christie’s. “That’s what we should focus on.”

But the price will be closely watched — not just as one of fewer than 20 paintings by Da Vinci’s hand accepted to exist, but by its owner Dmitry Rybolovlev, the boss of soccer club AS Monaco who is suing Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier in that city-state.

Rybolovlev, who spent an eye-watering $2.1 billion on 37 masterpieces purchased through Bouvier over a decade, accuses Bouvier of conning him by hundreds of million dollars by overcharging him on a string of deals, and pocketing the difference.

At the heart of the court battle is “Salvator Mundi,” which has been exhibited at The National Gallery in London.

Bouvier bought the Da Vinci at Sotheby’s for $80 million in 2013. He resold it within days to the Russian tycoon, for $127.5 million, netting a $47.5 million profit. Bouvier denies any wrongdoing.

The painting’s rarity is difficult to overstate. For years it was presumed to have been destroyed.

Long believed to have been a copy, before eventually being certified as authentic, it fetched a mere 45 pounds ($60 in today’s money) in 1958 before disappearing again for decades. It emerged only in 2005 when it was purchased from a US estate.

All other known paintings by Da Vinci are held in museum or institutional collections.

“For auction specialists, this is pretty much the Holy Grail,” Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of Christie’s Americas postwar and contemporary art department, has said. “It doesn’t really get better than that.”

 A Ferrari on the block

Christie’s has sought to emphasize Da Vinci’s inestimable contribution to art history by hanging “Salvator Mundi” next to Andy Warhol’s “Sixty Last Suppers” — which depicts Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” 60 times over, also on sale with a $50 million estimate.

Pablo Picasso holds the world record for the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction. His “The Women of Algiers (Version O)” fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in New York in 2015.

Other highlights being offered by the auction house are “Contraste de formes,” a 1913 Fernand Leger valued at $65 million and “Laboureur dans un champ” by Van Gogh, painted from the window of a French asylum in 1889 and valued at $50 million.

Sotheby’s, whose May sales languished behind Christie’s, says it has more than 60 works making their auction debuts this week.

Chief among them is Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of George Dyer,” valued at $35-45 million, and which it says is appearing in public for the first time in 50 years. Bacon painted the work in 1966 during his passionate relationship with Dyer.

Two other such triptychs are in museums, while an additional two have been offered at auction in recent years.

Sotheby’s other star lot is a 1972 Warhol “Mao,” exhibited in Berlin, Turin and Paris, and now back in public view for the first time since 1974. It has been given an estimate of $30-40 million.

Each of the other 10 “Mao” paintings of the same size are in prestigious public and private collections, including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Sotheby’s calls it one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

And for the first time, the house has added a rare automobile to an art auction, offering Michael Schumacher’s Grand Prix-Winning Ferrari for upwards of $4 million on Thursday. But is it a work of art?

“No, it’s not,” said Gregoire Billault, senior Sotheby’s vice president, of the sleek, low-slung, fire-engine red vehicle. “But it’s… the very best racing car ever sold at an auction.”

 

 
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For the first time, a museum in Australia is telling the stories of the massacres by colonists of indigenous people from an Aboriginal perspective. Thousands of First Nation people are believe to have been killed by white settlers until the 1940s, but much of that history is yet to be uncovered.

Near the city of Portland is the site of the oldest known massacre of indigenous people in the Australian state of Victoria. 

There was tension in the early 1830s between European settlers, who had set up a whaling station, and a local Aboriginal tribe over a whale carcass. The precise details of the confrontation have been hard to establish, but 60 to 200 First Nation people were killed in what is known as the Convincing Ground massacre.

The killings are part of a series of stories being told in a new exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. Called “Black Day, Sun Rises, Blood Runs,” the multimedia show is included in the museum’s Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Center.

Indigenous stories

The stories are told by indigenous people who have been filmed at the sites of several massacres.

Officials say the testimony tries to fill gaps in the documentation of the killings contained in court proceedings, newspaper reports and Aboriginal records.

Curator Genevieve Grieves says the exhibition contains valuable historical information.

“We are going quite deeply into six narratives that include massacre, they include resistance, they include the native police, who were used against Aboriginal people in Victoria and other parts of the country,” she said, “And we are really doing that through first-person voice. So we are just talking to people connected to those spaces and so we have got what is on the historical record, but also what is contained in memory as well, in indigenous memory and, indeed, in non-indigenous memory as well.”

Grieves says this is the first time a new permanent exhibition at an Australian museum has detailed the stories of the massacres from an indigenous perspective.

Thousands massacred

According to the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, about 1,200 indigenous people in Victoria state died in 40 massacres from the 1830s to the 1850s. Academics say that armed white settlers or farmers would ambush Aboriginal camps in the night or early morning.

In July, an online map marking the massacres of Aboriginal clans across Australia’s colonial frontier was launched. It detailed more than 150 sites where violent attacks against indigenous groups took place in eastern Australia following the arrival of European settlers in the late 1700s.
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Despite 70 years of tense relations between India and Pakistan, the two countries share a passion for each other’s movies, food and fashion trends. Take the example of palazzos, a popular Pakistani type of pants that are all the rage in India. VOA Urdu’s Ritul Joshi reports from Delhi that the trend started after a new Indian TV channel started broadcasting Pakistani dramas.
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U.S. women’s soccer star Hope Solo on Friday accused Sepp Blatter of sexual assault, claiming the disgraced former FIFA president groped her backside at the 2013 Ballon d’Or ceremony.

Solo, 36, her country’s standout goalkeeper, said Blatter, 81, committed the act shortly before she was to present an award to her teammate Abby Wambach.

“It was a few years ago at the Ballon d’Or ceremony, just before I got on stage,” Solo told Portuguese newspaper Expresso.

A spokesman for Blatter, however, said the accusation was “ridiculous.”

Solo, a World Cup winner and two-time Olympic champion, made the allegation on the sidelines of the Web Summit being held in Lisbon.

She said sexual harassment on the part of male officials was a common problem in women’s soccer.

“I have seen this all of my career, and I would like to see more athletes speak about their experiences,” said Solo.

“It’s out of control, not just in Hollywood but everywhere,” she added, referring to the firestorm of sexual harassment allegations in entertainment, politics and sport ever since the scandal involving Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein unfolded.

Blatter was president of FIFA from 1998 until 2015, when he was banned for corruption.
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With his career imploding over allegations of sexual misconduct, comedian Louis C.K. confessed Friday to masturbating in front of women and expressed remorse for wielding his influence “irresponsibly.”

The comedian said in a statement that the harassment claims by five women detailed in a New York Times report published Thursday “are true.”

“I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on them,” he said.

“There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for,” he wrote. “And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.”

He apologized to the cast and crew of several projects he’s been working on, his family, children and friends, his manager and the FX network, among others.

The 438-word statement ends with the comedian vowing to stop talking and leave the spotlight, sating “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”

The comedian stepped forward on the same day the indie distributor The Orchard said it will scrap the release of C.K.’s film “I Love You, Daddy.” C.K. has already been edited out of the upcoming HBO benefit “Night of Too Many Stars” and his work is being scrubbed from the cable network’s vaults.

More fallout came Friday when Netflix said it will not produce a second planned standup special starring the comedian, citing his “unprofessional and inappropriate behavior.” He had been tapped for two specials, with the first airing in April. At least five of the comedian’s stand-up specials remain on Netflix.

C.K. is the latest high-profile man caught in a flood of accusations that began after an October report in the New York Times alleging that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed or assaulted several women. Others who face sexual harassment or assault accusations include “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey and filmmaker Brett Ratner.

The widening allegations have also reached former “Gossip Girl” actor Ed Westwick. The BBC scrapped a TV series in the wake of rape allegations against Westwick. The broadcaster also paused filming on the 1980s-set sitcom “White Gold,” which stars Westwick. He has been accused of raping two women, charges he denies. On Instagram, he called the allegations “unverified and provably untrue.”

“ER” actor Anthony Edwards revealed that he was molested when he was 12 by director and producer Gary Goddard. In a post Friday on Medium, Edwards said he’s been in therapy for years over the assault and confronted Goddard over it 22 years ago at an airport. Goddard, he said, “swore to his remorse.” Attorney Alan Grodin, a lawyer for Goddard, said Goddard has been out of the country and “will have a response shortly.”

Actor Jeremy Piven also took to social media to once again declare his innocence of sexual misconduct, saying on Twitter he hopes the string of sexual harassment allegations will lead to “a constructive dialogue on these issues” but warned about “false accusations.”

“We seem to be entering dark times — allegations are being printed as facts and lives are being put in jeopardy without a hearing, due process or evidence. I hope we can give people the benefit of the doubt before we rush to judgment,” he wrote.

Piven, who has been accused by two women of sexual misconduct, faces a fresh accusation made against him from an advertising executive. Tiffany Bacon Scourby told People magazine that Piven held her down while he performed a sex act at a hotel 14 years ago.

The crisis has also roiled the world of journalism, with editors at The New Republic and NPR losing their jobs. The latest accusation involved Rolling Stone: Ben Ryan, a freelance writer, accused the magazine’s publisher, Jann Wenner, of sexual harassment, saying Wenner offered a writing contract if Ryan spent the night at the publisher’s Manhattan townhouse. Wenner acknowledges he did attempt to have a sexual liaison but denied offering a writing contract for sex.

In other developments, Jenny McCarthy also reiterated an allegation she made against Steven Seagal, saying she fled from a 1995 audition with Seagal after he repeatedly asked her to take off her clothes for a part that didn’t require nudity.

McCarthy recounted her encounter with Seagal during a tryout for “Under Siege 2” on her Sirius XM radio show Thursday, a day after actress Portia de Rossi accused Seagal of unzipping his pants during an audition.

McCarthy said Seagal was the only person in the room when she showed up to read for her part, she said. After declining his invitation to sit next to him on a couch, McCarthy, who said she purposefully wore a loose-fitting garment to the audition so the focus would be on her acting instead of her body, said Seagal asked her to remove her clothes. When McCarthy countered that she was told the part didn’t require her to be naked, she said Seagal told her that it involved “off-camera nudity.”

“I know you must have a beautiful body underneath there. Can you lower it so I can see your breasts,” she recalled Seagal saying.

A representative for Seagal didn’t immediately return a request for comment Friday, but a Seagal spokesman has denied McCarthy’s accusations to The Daily Beast. McCarthy told the same story to Movieline in 1998.
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Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman says she is among the young women sexually abused by a former USA Gymnastics team doctor.

Raisman tells “60 Minutes” she was 15 when she was first treated by Dr. Larry Nassar, who spent more than two decades working with athletes at USA Gymnastics. He’s now is in jail in Michigan awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.

Raisman, the captain of the 2012 and 2016 Olympic gold-medal winning teams, details the abuse in her book “Fierce,” which will be released on Tuesday. Raisman’s interview with “60 Minutes” will air on Sunday night.

Raisman is the latest gymnast to claim she was sexually abused by Nassar. McKayla Maroney, who won two medals at the 2012 Games as Raisman’s teammate, said last month she was molested for years by Nassar.

Nassar also is awaiting trial on separate criminal sexual conduct charges and has been sued by more than 125 women alleging sexual abuse. Nassar has pleaded not guilty to the assault charges, and the dozens of civil suits filed in Michigan are currently in mediation.

USA Gymnastics said in a statement Friday that Raisman sharing her personal experience took “great courage” and it is “appalled by the conduct of which Larry Nassar is accused.”

The 23-year-old Raisman has been highly critical of USA Gymnastics in recent months, calling for leadership change at the top of the organization while advocating for athlete’s rights.

USA Gymnastics launched an independent review of its policies in the wake of the allegations against Nassar and reporting by the Indianapolis Star in August 2016 that highlighted chronic mishandling of sexual abuse allegations against coaches and staff at some of its more than 3,500 clubs across the country.

Nassar began working with USA Gymnastics as an athletic trainer in 1986 and became the national team doctor in 1996. He stepped down in 2014 but remained on staff before being fired in 2015.

“These girls, they should be comfortable going to USA Gymnastics and saying ‘I need help, I want therapy. I need this,’” Raisman said in an interview with The Associated Press and USA Today in August during the 2017 national championships.

Raisman declined to get into specifics at that time about whether she was abused by Nassar but painted a vivid picture of how Nassar’s behavior went unchecked.

“I think that, you just want, you want to trust people and that he was just a disgusting person, he took advantage of so many people’s trust,” Raisman said. “And I think, it just disgusts me he was a doctor. It’s crazy. Because when a doctor says something you want to believe him and it’s just awful.”

Jamie Dantzscher, a bronze medalist on the 2000 U.S. Olympic team, filed a lawsuit against Nassar in California in September 2016. She says Nassar touched her inappropriately while disguising the abuse as treatment. Dantzscher initially filed as “Jane Doe” but came forward publicly to “60 Minutes” in February.

In June, the gymnastics board adopted the new USA Gymnastics SafeSport Policy that replaced the previous policy. Key updates include mandatory reporting, defining six types of misconduct, setting standards to prohibit grooming behavior, preventing inappropriate interaction and establishing accountability.

In July, the organization hired Toby Stark, a child welfare advocate, as its director of SafeSport. Part of Stark’s mandate is educating members on rules, educational programs and reporting. The federation also adopted several recommendations by Deborah Daniels, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the review. USA Gymnastics now has the power to withhold membership from clubs that decline to report claims of abuse.

Clubs are now “required to report child abuse or neglect, including sexual misconduct, to proper authorities, including the U.S. Center for SafeSport and law enforcement authorities.”

The organization has taken some steps to provide more oversight and safety to its national team gymnasts.

Team members who fly into Houston for training camps must be escorted to the camp with at least two other people to avoid any one-on-one interaction. Underage female gymnasts with male coaches who are picked to compete internationally must now travel with a credentialed female chaperone. One-on-one visits by medical staff are prohibited at cabins the athletes use during overnight stays at the national training center.

USA Gymnastics announced Tuesday it hired Kerry Perry as the organization’s new president and CEO. Perry starts on Dec. 1.
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A Swedish radio station says a pirate broadcaster briefly broke into its Friday morning show and broadcast an English-language pop song urging Westerners to join the Islamic State group.

Jakob Gravestam, a spokesman for the Bauer Media group that operates the Mix Megapol station in Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city, said in a statement that the incident would be reported to police and the Swedish government agency that monitors electronic communications, among others.

The 24Malmo news site said the song entitled “For the Sake of Allah” was played for about 30 minutes on the FM and internet-based radio station that is part of a private radio network airing in 24 cities across the country and claims to reach 91 percent of Sweden’s 10 million people.
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