News: Maid Assaulted in New York City
(Long Island, N.Y.) The former chairman of an Egyptian Bank of Alexandria was arrested for sexually abusing a maid in a Manhattan hotel room. The seventy-four-year-old business executive allegedly held the forty-four-year-old woman against her will. Police and authorities on the case found the woman’s allegations to be credible.
This incident comes weeks after a lead for the French presidential candidacy denied accusations of sexually assaulting a maid at the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square. He was an International Monetary Fund leader who resigned on May 18th after being charged with attempted rape. He has been placed on house arrest in a posh TriBeCa townhouse while he awaits trial.
This week’s incident happened on Sunday, May 29th at roughly six in the evening at the Pierre Hotel in Midtown, Manhattan. The hotel is located between 61st Street and Fifth Avenue near Central Park in the Upper East Side. According to reports, the rates begin at almost eight-hundred-dollars a night, and it is part of the Taj Group of Hotels and Palaces of India.
Spokesmen for the hotel claim that they will participate in any way possible to aid police and detectives in their investigation. They maintain that the safety of their guests and staff is always their top priority. The overwhelming similarities between both cases have made some wonder if the second instance was a copycat crime.
The ex-banker, who also worked for the Egyptian American Bank and Federation of Egyptian Banks, was the board chair of El-Mex Salines Co. According to reports, it is the largest salt producer in the Middle East. He was charged with sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment, forcible touch, and harassment.
He was arraigned Tuesday at a Manhattan Criminal Court after being held at a precinct on Monday night. He was taken from a booking facility near court offices and investigated by detectives from the Nineteenth Precinct. The incident began in his nine-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel room on the tenth floor of the building where he answered the door in his nightwear.
After requesting tissues, he asked the maid to place them on the table before allegedly closing and locking the door. He then grabbed, kissed, and fondled her as she attempted to fight him off. She claimed to have told him she wasn’t “there for that” before he grabbed her a second time and the struggle continued.
He finished by asking for her number, and she claimed to have given a false one before exiting the room. The maid, who worked at the hotel for about a year, did not return to her job on Monday. According to reports, she attempted to inform the hotel staff and security, but was instructed that she had to contact a direct supervisor who had not been working on the day of the incident.
For such reasons, the incident was not reported until Monday. Some members of the hotel staff had stated that they were shocked at the accusations, and claimed that the ex-banker seemed to be a pleasant man.
