Tennis Where is Peng Shuai?
The disappearance of the tennis player who accused a former Chinese vice premier of rape
"I know I can't say it clearly and it's useless to say it. But I want to say it anyway. I'm a hypocrite. I admit I'm not a good girl."
Peng Shuai (35 years old) began with this paragraph the letter he published on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, on November 2.
It barely stayed online for 35 minutes before it was censored.
After the first reflection, the Chinese tennis star went on to
address what happened three years ago when he finished a match on the court of a Beijing hotel
with Zhang Gaoli (75 years old), a former deputy prime minister who had just retired.
"After I finished playing, you and your wife Kang Jie took me to their house. I had dinner with you and Kang. You took me to your room and, as happened in Tianjin more than ten years ago,
you wanted to have sex with me
. I was very scared that afternoon, I didn't expect things to be like this. "
The tennis player says she had already had sex with Zhang before he was promoted in 2014 to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the highest governing body. "He never contacted me again." Until the day of the tennis match in 2018, Peng had not only been the mistress of one of China's most powerful political leaders.
In his letter he speaks of love, of the unfulfilled promise of a future life as a couple
and implies that it was a relationship consented to by the politician's wife.
"I had buried everything inside of me. Why did you come looking for me again?
You took me to your house and forced me to have sex. I have no evidence
and it would be impossible for me to keep any evidence. You said that in those seven years you never forgot you from me and that you would treat me well. You said much more than that, and the purpose was basically to persuade me to lower my guard (...) You denied everything afterwards. That afternoon I originally did not consent and cried all the time. "
Peng describes how her emotions grew stronger and stronger towards Zhang. "You told me that you loved me, that you hope that in the next life we can meet, but that in your position it is impossible to divorce. At first everything was fine, but as time passed, things gradually began to change. There was so much injustice. and humiliation. Every time you asked me to come to your house,
your wife told me so many ugly and hurtful things behind your back.
All kinds of teasing. Since the first day I met you, I have never used a penny of your money, nor have I used you for any benefit. "
In her publication,
the tennis player assures that their relationship ended after a great discussion
on the night of October 30. Although they had arranged to speak on November 2 at the former politician's house. "Today at noon you called to say you're busy. And so, you disappeared again, like seven years ago. You played with me." That same day he posted his letter on Weibo.
No one has seen Peng Shuai since she blurted out that a former leader of the Chinese Communist Party had sexually abused her. Every day there are more voices within the world of tennis that are added to show their
concern about the whereabouts of the Chinese tennis player
. The hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai has been one of the most shared this week on Twitter. From
Serena Williams
,
Naomi Osaka
or
Novak Djokovic
, to the footballer
Gerard Piqué
.
The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) has been
pressing China for
the past week
to confirm Peng's situation
and investigate her allegations, even threatening to withdraw her lucrative business from the country if such measures are not taken.
"We are ready to pull out of our business and deal with all the complications that come with it," said Steve Simon, the WTA director, in an interview Thursday with CNN.
On Saturday, Dick Pound, a senior member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), assured Reuters that growing concern about the Chinese tennis player's safety could push the body to "take a hard line" against Beijing, which is finalizing preparations to host the Winter Olympics next February.
Even the US government
and the UN came to Peng's defense
.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday that Chinese authorities should "provide independent and verifiable evidence of his whereabouts and that he is safe."
Liz Throssell, a spokeswoman for the UN human rights office in Geneva, called for "a fully transparent investigation" into the sexual assault charge.
"What we would say is that it would be important to have proof of their whereabouts and well-being, and we urge that a full transparency investigation be carried out into their allegations," Throssell said.
Peng's is not the first complaint of its kind within the silenced MeToo movement.
But until now it had never splashed on someone who was part of the political elite of the second world power.
Neither the complainant was a high-level athlete who has won Wimbledon and Roland Garros doubles and was the first Chinese tennis player to reach number one in that category.
Doubts about an alleged email from you
China has so-called "residential surveillance in a designated place", the RSDL, an extrajudicial prison system introduced in 2012 that allows the police to isolate people accused of endangering national security or even "causing trouble." I term that they can legally use to silence critics, excluding lawyers from the process.
It is a black hole that many activists have passed through.
That Peng was detained under the RSDL was one of the rumors that began to spread in the face of silence from within China.
But the silence was broken on Wednesday with an
email that the state chain CGTN published on its website
and that was supposedly written by Peng.
"I am not lost or insecure. I have just been resting at home and everything is fine", it was possible to read in an email that many have doubted that it is the work of the tennis player herself, starting with the director of the WTA, Steve Simon .
"I find it hard to believe that Peng Shuai actually wrote the email
. I have repeatedly tried to communicate with her through numerous forms of communication, without success," Simon blurted out.
The next move from China was on Friday night, when a journalist from the CGTN chain, controlled by the Chinese government, posted on Twitter several screenshots of some photographs that the tennis player had allegedly just sent to a friend on WeChat, the Chinese WhatsApp, wishing you a "happy weekend".
That did not serve to curb skepticism.
Both analysts, international media, and the WTA say that
no one has been able to corroborate the authenticity that these photos
were taken on Friday or that the tennis player had not sent them under some kind of coercion.
According to the latest editorial in the Global Times, the loudest English-language propaganda channel in the Communist Party, Peng will "soon" be speaking in public.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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