The far-left Los Angeles Times has suspended Beijing Bureau chief Jonathan Kaiman over an allegation of sexual misconduct, his second in a year.
“On Monday, former Beijing-based journalist Felicia Sonmez sent a letter to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China detailing ‘problematic behavior’ during a sexual encounter with Kaiman in September,” the Times reports.
Sonmez claims that after a party in Beijing, she and Kaiman “left together on her scooter while heavily intoxicated.” During the drive, she alleges he used the opportunity to “repeatedly grope her without her consent.”
After arriving at his place, she says Kaiman “backed her against a wall and began undressing himself in public while ignoring her protests.”
She admits they “engaged in intercourse in his apartment, but that she was uncertain about the circumstances.”
“Many parts of the night remain hazy,” she wrote. “I am devastated by the fact that I was not more sober so that I could say with absolute certainty whether what happened that night was rape.”
Kaiman denies all wrongdoing and says everything that happened was consensual.
Back in January, Kaiman was publicly accused of a similar act of alleged misconduct. A woman named Laura Tucker claimed that in 2013, Kaiman pressured her into sex after a night of drinking in Beijing.
After engaging in consensual kissing and undressing on the bed, she says she told Kaiman “no” because she did not things to go any further. He refused to move off the bed, she claims, and then began to “whine” and to “debate” the issue until she felt her only alternative to giving in to the sex would be for things to get ugly. She consented to the sex but “felt gross for all of it.”
“I was pressured into sex by an opportunistic friend. I explicitly voiced my lack of consent several times, and my words has no effect,” she says. “Jon did not listen to me, did not respect my wishes or my space, and wasn’t open to the evening ending any other way.”
This specific accusation cost Kaiman his role as president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.
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