BREAKING: "Adult Grooming" Scandal DESTROYS the International Criminal Court!
A consortium of International Women’s Whatever NGOs put out a frantic statement in advance of the vote scheduled for July 24 to oust Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). No such vote had ever taken place before in the history of the ICC, founded only in 2002, and no prior prosecutor had ever been removed. Hardly anyone seemed to understand the inscrutable bureaucratic vagaries of the process that led to this vote — or who would even be voting, and under what authority. But according to the NGO Ladies, what really mattered was that a strong and decisive verdict be resolutely delivered, because at issue was not “genocide,” or “war crimes,” or other matters generally seen to fall within the ICC’s more typical purview. Rather, it was “non-consensual sexual contact” — allegedly perpetrated by the Chief Prosecutor himself. Even worse, the feisty NGO women reminded us, Khan had allegedly inflicted these unthinkable acts on a “junior staff member.”
Left unmentioned in the strident statement: this “junior” victim was actually 37 years old at the time of the claimed infractions. And a working legal professional, with a Master’s Degree, who boasts that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales” nearly a decade ago — though whether this means she’s accredited to practice law is left ambiguous. Notwithstanding, the statement warned that “survivors of sexual violence” the world over were watching very closely to see how the ICC would resolve this problem — perhaps the most existentially threatening problem in the Court’s relatively short lifespan. Because should the opaque ICC governing mechanism fail to ensure proper “accountability,” the repercussions would be profound: survivors everywhere re-traumatized, “international law” itself imperiled.
Relevant stakeholders were thus put on notice “not to lose sight” of what this whole thing was really “about” — securing justice for the junior victim in her late 30s, yes, but as a proxy for all “survivors of gender-based crimes.” This meant stakeholders should avoid any needless distractions, such as, hypothetically, attempting to discern precisely what “misconduct” was even being alleged, or what definition of “non-consensual sexual contact” was even being asserted by the alleged victim. Dwelling on such considerations could unduly complicate matters.
Khan’s termination was soon to be voted on by something called the “Assembly of States Parties,” a nominal “legislative body” almost no one on Planet Earth has ever heard of, much less be able to explicate its apparent authorities. Which we are told include “management” and “oversight” of the International Criminal Court. OK. Any of the 125 signatory countries to the ICC may therefore send delegates to cast votes in this mysterious “Assembly,” and could take part in the ad hoc “special session” declared for July 24.
These enigmatic voters would’ve been under considerable pressure to plug their ears during the big “exclusive” CNN interview released July 16, in which we finally get a glimpse of the mythical “victim.” When she does drop some hints of what her definition of “non-consensual” might be, it’s probably better if prospective voters change the channel. Christiane Amanpour, who scored the “exclusive” sitdown, made sure to affect an air of “Solemnly Inquisitive, yet Survivor Sensitive” — presumably in accordance with various HR guidelines. At one point, she carefully asks the 39-year-old junior victim to please address the repeated categorical denials of her alleged abuser, Mr. Khan, that any sexual misconduct ever took place.
“There’s many ways in which I can answer this,” replied Sarah — identified only by her first name, for unspecified reasons, probably to do with “safety” — who affected her own studied posture of “emotional ticking time-bomb, but just barely holding it together, for the greater good.”
Sarah went on: “The first thing that I would say is that there is no way for something to be consensual when you have such a power disparity.”
Sooooooo… let’s get this straight. Because the ICC Chief Prosecutor was the “boss of all bosses” at the ICC, according to Sarah, it was inherently impossible that he could ever have engaged in any consenting sexual activity with her — a fellow legal professional in her late 30s — regardless of whatever behaviors she may have displayed at the time of the activity. That’s the theory Sarah waited 26 months to unveil on CNN; the “accusations” are said to have been first “disclosed” in May (April?) 2024, when she “had a breakdown” in the ICC office, and concerned colleagues rushed to her aid. By July 2026, the theory of consent she’d developed is that our professional adult victim could have literally sworn an affidavit to the gods of international law, declaring “I hereby consent to this forthcoming sexual activity,” and it still would have been non-consensual, because… something something “power dynamic.” OK. Lol.
Before proceeding any further, can we briefly pause to ponder who ultimately possessed the real “power” in this “dynamic”? Because yes, sure, it’s facially true that 39-year-old Sarah was subordinate to 56-year-old Karim, in terms of the relevant employment structure — she as a mere “Associate Legal Advisor” working out of his office, he as the Big Bossman Chief Prosecutor leading the global charge against Putin and Netanyahu. At the same time, here are some additional “power dynamics” that might be worth some fleeting consideration:
Sarah enjoyed rigorously-enforced anonymity for the duration of the 2+ year ordeal she unleashed — until July 16, 2026, when she had the red carpet rolled out for her by CNN producers. And even then, despite appearing on camera for a 46 minute interview, CNN made the executive editorial decision that it would be “only identifying her by her first name, at her request.”
What was the basis for this “request”? What was the journalistic rationale for acceding to it? Who knows! Who cares. Here’s one thing we do know: this was certainly not a luxury Mr. Karim Khan was ever afforded. He’s been called every name in the book since the “accusations” first started percolating, and then were leaked to likeminded journalists. (The NYT also inexplicably agreed to Sarah’s “condition” that she would only be quoted by her first name in an article announcing she’d finally “broken her silence.”)
It didn’t take too much intrepid investigative journalism to figure out the full name of this 39-year-old legal professional, so I went ahead and tweeted it out a few days ago: Sarah Hishan. Wow, I can’t imagine the grave re-victimization she must be suffering now because I have non-consensually posted “Hishan” in addition to “Sarah.” Sure hope I don’t end up in The Hague!
If you’d like, you can learn more about Sarah’s background by consulting a 2025 academic tract entitled “The International Criminal Court: Legal, Policy, and Political Challenges,” where she is thanked in the acknowledgements — by her (gasp) non-anonymized name and job title — for all she supposedly did to assist editor Richard H. Steinberg understand the “challenges” facing the Office of the Prosecutor, led by Mr. Khan, with whom Sarah so closely worked. (Notably, her “accusation” odyssey had already been in full swing by the volume’s publication date.) If anyone’s interested in purchasing the eBook for $214, let me know what specific “challenges” related to Ms. Hishan found their way into the text. Or perhaps email Professor Steinberg at UCLA Law School and inquire if he plans to issue a revised edition anytime soon, in light of newly revealed “challenges.”
When all was said and done, the reputed beneficiary of the “Power Imbalance,” Karim Khan, wound up professionally extirpated, personally humiliated, privacy thoroughly infringed, tarred with scandal-maximizing media leaks — which he was largely prevented from refuting, due to the maddeningly indecipherable ad hoc procedures of this bizarre international bureaucracy. And to top it all off, he was suspended from the Bar of England and Wales. Meaning he cannot practice law in his country of birth, on account of his presumed liability for “sexual misconduct” offenses. The list undoubtedly goes on. So maybe that’s worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the contention that it was Khan who wielded insuperable “power” in the situation.
The official evidentiary record has essentially all been concealed from public view, perhaps due to some sacred principle of “international law” we mortals lack the ability to comprehend. So the only real primary source we have to go by is Sarah’s recent CNN interview. I can’t exactly say I would “recommend” watching this interview. Just like I wouldn’t recommend watching someone being executed by lethal injection. You might learn something, but don’t do it for pleasure. Anyone who might consider watching Sarah’s interview should first acclimate into the right mindset. Here’s very much the wrong mindset: expecting to get the one thing “normies” might foolishly assume they’d be getting if they tuned in to such an interview. That is: lots of concrete detail about what specific “sexual misconduct” Sarah is alleging she endured. Because what we mostly get instead is a televised version of the famed June 2026 NYT expose that set into motion the spectacular downfall of a certain Maine resident.
I can pretty much just copy-and-paste from my description of that NYT article. What CNN fundamentally did here was give Sarah Hishan a sort of weird therapeutic self-realization forum, and invite her to “emotionally reconstruct and narrativize her past experiences with Platner Khan, creating a psychological profile from which the NYT CNN could purport to divine a pattern of his ‘unsettling’ ‘rageful, boundary-crossing’ behavior.”
We learn a great deal in the interview about Sarah’s “subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner Khan,” such as that when she made her initial “disclosure” in 2024, she was “exhausted” and “extremely emotional.” Which sheds some partial light on how it came to pass that one day a male colleague discovered her “visibly distressed,” and deputized himself to submit some sort of complaint on her behalf, to some inscrutable bureaucratic entity called the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM). Alright. Good info.
But again, most people who’d voluntarily watch this CNN interview for some reason would’ve likely assumed that the main reason they’re watching is to hear expounded for the first time — in a thrilling “world exclusive” — all the juicy details of the “sexual misconduct” which had been kept under wraps since April/May 2024. However, Sarah does just about everything but offer tangible details of her purported victimization. Instead she zigs and zags all over the place, weaving out a heavily emotionalized first-person narrative that she and CNN evidently decided the rest of the world needed to participate in. Here’s her full answer when Amanpour asks her to respond to Khan’s emphatic denials:
The first thing that I would have to say is that this did not happen in isolation. This was an environment where we were always on the move. There was always a crisis because that is what happens at the court, you have to deal with multiple things. And it’s also very emotional work that you’re doing. Mr. Khan himself, in my experience, was a very reactive individual. And he could go from being fine and collaborative, to angry, for example, at criticism in social media. And that would be this rage. And so, you kind of always felt like the ground was shifting under you. And there was a — I have no other way to describe it, but an escalation of attempts. And so, that escalation was happening in this environment, where you are trying desperately to almost emotionally regulate Mr. Khan. And as I would describe it, the point of the physical nature of it. But it didn’t start that way. Because it was kind of like encroachments on the boundaries slowly, not just physically, but emotionally as well.
Pray tell, what advanced degree in NGO studies do I need to acquire in order to decipher, based on the above collection of words, what “sexual misconduct” this woman is actually alleging she was subjected to?
As the interview meanders along, it becomes clearer and clearer that the crux of the claimed “misconduct” is rooted in whatever novel interpretive paradigm Sarah has constructed, met with solemn affirmation by Amanpour, according to which, in light of the purported “power disparity,” everything that might’ve taken place between Khan and herself — whether sexually or even “emotionally” — hath been decreed “non-consensual.” As though this judgment was handed down by the Supreme Heavenly Magistrate of International Law. Pressed gently to elaborate just a bit, Sarah goes on to say:
SARAH: I will give you two examples. One is there was a point in time when I said to Mr. Khan that if this continued, I was afraid that I might do something to myself.
AMANPOUR: So, you had suicidal thoughts?
SARAH: I never used that word internally, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. And Mr. Khan understood fully. He was actually very kind in that moment. And he said, I would never want you to harm yourself. And he stopped. I would say about two or three weeks, but that was worse. Because prior to that, it was like being a zombie or being in a fog. But in those two or three weeks, I was really hopeful, because he wasn’t retaliating against me. The work was happening. And so, I thought it was done. And that’s all I ever wanted for it just to be finished. And then it started again. And so, the crash was even worse.
(emphasis mine)
Huh? What is “this”? What is “it”? Why doesn’t our esteemed CNN interviewer ask these seemingly basic followup questions? We still have hardly any idea what the heck Sarah’s even talking about, beyond some supplemental info about her troubled emotional state, which has kind of been established already.
Absent further clarification, here’s one possibility a viewer might infer about the potential meaning of “this” and “it” — how about, “consensual adult relationship”? Which… unsurprisingly… this woman came to experience as emotionally taxing in certain ways? Perhaps… because… she was married at the time? …with a child? Just throwing a crazy theory out there. (Khan was also married.)
So in other words, a thing happened that extremely commonly happens among consenting adults, for better or worse, particularly in close-knit workplace environments that are “very emotional” and intense (as Sarah describes it). A certain feeling arises between male-female colleagues, whatever their existing marital status and… there you have it. No great puzzle here, really?
Object all you like to marital infidelity on ethical, religious, practical, or other grounds — but it’s simply not “sexual misconduct” in the way most commonsense people would have recognized the term, at least if they haven’t yet been educated on the latest frontiers in uncontrolled concept-creep, and therefore may not be aware of how easy it’s become to re-categorize and re-frame a limitless range of behaviors as “sexual misconduct,” “sexual assault,” or even (drumroll) rape. In the very recent past, “having an affair with a co-worker” would have never been widely viewed as something intrinsically violative. Buckle up though, and flip that antiquated attitude upside down, because as of July 24, 2026, a brand-spanking-new precedent has been enshrined in the annals of “international law.”
As we move along here, bear in mind that through a giant game of international media “telephone,” Karim Khan just spent the better part of the past two years being publicly branded as someone who stands credibly accused not just of hazy “misconduct,” but of “sexual assault”:
L’Orient Today — October 28, 2024: “Faced with accusations of sexual assault and abuse of authority, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan denied the allegations”
Wall Street Journal — May 10, 2025: “ICC Set Plan to Charge Netanyahu Just After Prosecutor Was Accused of Sexual Assault”
New York Post — May 14, 2025: “ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan asked a woman who accused him of sexual assault to drop charges so he could issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”
The New Yorker — October 5, 2025: “The accuser has told the U.N. investigators that Khan sexually assaulted her in his office”
The Guardian — March 22, 2026: “Inquiry into sexual assault claims did not establish that chief prosecutor’s actions amounted to misconduct, judges advise”
Reuters — April 2, 2026: “ICC member states have voted to pursue disciplinary proceedings against Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan after receiving reports regarding sexual assault allegations against him, two sources briefed on the matter told Reuters”
The Australian — June 19, 2026: “The court’s oversight body found sexual assault allegations against Karim Khan were credible”
The Times (UK) — July 17, 2026: “The woman who accused a British KC and chief international prosecutor of sexually assaulting her during a work trip has revealed her identity for the first time”
Washington Post — July 24, 2026: “Shortly before requesting the warrants in May 2024, Khan was accused by a staff member of sexual assault”
Al Jazeera English — July 25, 2026: “Khan was removed from office over sexual assault allegations”
Yet despite this deluge of condemnatory media, by no rational metric could what Sarah Hishan alleged in her lengthy open-ended CNN interview be reasonably characterized as anything close to “sexual assault.” She herself never once uses that term throughout the 46+ minute video therapy session, even though her support-sister Christiane Amanpour introduces the interview by intoning: “We do want to warn you that the accusations you hear may be triggering, especially for survivors of sexual assault.” And then Amanpour concludes the interview by giving out the toll-free number of the “US Sexual Assault Hotline.” (It’s 1-800-656-4673 if anyone reading this Substack has been inadvertently “triggered.”)
According to secret evidence Amanpour says she received, a witness told investigators sometime in the past two years that they “directly asked” Sarah if she was ever “raped” by Khan. And by way of response, Sarah “looked down, sighed, and shrugged.” So that’s apparently some disconfirmative evidence — otherwise concealed from the public, except for Amanpour’s leaked paraphrase — suggesting that when Sarah was asked contemporaneously if she endured the closest available corollary to “sexual assault,” she said nothing, and “shrugged.” OK.
Here’s her explanation to Amanpour for this odd behavior: “Throughout everything that has happened, I haven’t placed a label on anything. One, because I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession. It’s not my place to label anything.”
Uh… really? She’s a lawyer by profession, but “not a lawyer in this,” and therefore it’s “not her place” to put a “label” on anything she claims happened to her? Well, that’s her prerogative I guess, but it’s curious that her own refusal to “label” things didn’t stop the screaming media headlines from freely affixing the most incendiary “labels” — namely “sexual assault,” sometimes interspersed with “sexual misconduct” or “sexual abuse,” I guess depending on the random whims of the journalist that day.
Sarah explains that aside from her self-imposed lawyerly disqualification, there is also another reason for her label-aversion, and it’s “a little bit more personal. If I would put a label, whatever that label is, I’m not sure how I can get through the day. And I have had to play multiple roles in this. And I’m also a mom. So, I have to function. So, it has been easier for me.”
I guess that roughly translates to: “It would be emotionally burdensome for Sarah to apply any discomfiting labels to the conduct she alleges she was victimized by, and which spawned a series of events that has now thrown the entire International Criminal Court into possibly unsalvageable disarray.” This is the evidentiary standard that “international law” is now gonna use going forward, as a matter of precedent, to designate somebody a presumed sexual assaulter? Which Karim Khan has most definitely been designated; the vote last Friday by 82 ICC member-states to oust him does nothing if not perceivedly vindicate the impression that he really must have committed assault, misconduct, rape, or [fill in the blank].
Just asking questions here: but what’s one possible way one might try to rationalize a consensual yet adulterous sexual relationship, to oneself or others, in the event that this relationship comes to be viewed (by you) as embarrassing or lamentable in some fashion — you don’t want your spouse or work colleagues to find out, because you fear they’ll think poorly of you? Well, apparently one thing you can do as of July 2026 — if you’re a professional adult woman in her late 30s, anyway — is re-classify the regretful relationship as having come about through some vaguely illicit process of “monthslong grooming.” That’s how the media outfit known as “DropSite News” bizarrely chose to describe the Sarah/Karim relationship dynamic on May 10, 2025, when Sarah was still fully anonymized, in a bombshell scoop that journalist Alice Speri was intrepidly able to “confirm”:
Drop Site has confirmed that the woman’s accusations were far more serious than what has been revealed so far, and include what she described to colleagues as monthslong grooming, psychological coercion, and sexual advances, which eventually escalated into “unwanted” and “coerced” sex that lasted nearly a year and continued even after she told Khan that his conduct had left her suicidal.
It would be interesting to go back and review whatever journalistic “confirmation” methods are in use over at “DropSite,” because for one thing, the claim that Sarah ever told Khan “his conduct left her suicidal” has now been disconfirmed by none other than Sarah herself. Whoops. (And just a quick clarifying Q. — How exactly are sexual relationships supposed to be initiated nowadays, other than by “sexual advances” one or another party chooses to initiate, and which the advance-receiving party can either accept or reject?)
Numerous other details also stand out in the historic DropSite report, such as Alice Speri relaying that “according to several people,” Khan and his supporters were orchestrating a shameful “smear campaign” against the purported “victim,” then unknown, today mercifully known to be sweet Sarah. These disgraceful “smears” portrayed Sarah as “unstable” and “with a distorted view of reality.” There couldn’t have possibly been an ounce of truth to any of this, according to DropSite — which must’ve “confirmed” its conclusion through an impeccable process of journalistic verification, located somewhere in the deep recesses of Ryan Grim’s lady-believing brain. (After all, Grim’s a bigtime believer in the likes of Tara Reade, Whitney Webb, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Maria Farmer, Christine Blasey Ford, Lisa Bloom, etc. — why pump the brakes now with Sarah Hishan?)
One of the funniest things ever is that this gravely serious DropSite report ended up getting cited by — wait for it — Israel, which DropSite otherwise algorithmically programs its content against at every conceivable opportunity. Any fleeting indicia of Israel coming within twelve emails of Jeffrey Epstein is insinuated as proof that Epstein must’ve been running some massive child rape operation at Mossad’s command. In a November 17, 2025 appeal brief submitted by Israel to the ICC, challenging the arrest warrants Khan sought against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the momentous “Drop Site” article is referenced a hilarious 25 times — more than any other news source! Gilad Noam, the Attorney General of Israel, relays that “an online journalistic platform called Drop Site” had helpfully reported “significant new details about the sexual misconduct allegations” against Khan, and this should cast extreme doubt on the veracity of Khan’s requested arrest warrant. Indeed, he argued, Khan must be disqualified from any further ICC proceedings against Israel in light of DropSite’s report that he tried to “smear” Sarah McVictim by disgracefully questioning the accuracy of her reality-perception capabilities. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
(Netanyahu has been gloating since Khan’s ouster, of course, telling Fox News viewers that Khan has now been “completely exposed” for his “sexual crimes.”)
As perversely comical as all this is, from my perspective, the best part of DropSite’s contribution to the silly saga was definitely their pretension to be reporting that “far more serious” accusations were made against Khan than had been previously known at the time. Among these extraordinarily serious accusations: that Khan had mired Sarah in a depraved “monthslong grooming” campaign. Apparently no one in the DropSite editorial crew had the slightest flicker of doubt that a professional adult woman in her late 30s claiming she was “groomed” — over the course of many months, by a fellow adult legal professional — was as supremely super “serious” as any “accusation” could ever get. Grim & co. must’ve openly wept while they guided that little bombshell through their fiercely independent adversarial editing process.
“Seriously” though: this must be some kind of joke? The profoundly disturbing “sexual abuse” scandal (as DropSite described it) which has now culminated in a possibly fatal death blow to the International Criminal Court as a whole… is a scandal fundamentally about lawyer-on-lawyer “grooming”? Humble request: Can “DropSite” please add a sitcom laugh track to their website interface, to have on standby for the next time they purport to be weighing in on any matters of such “serious” nature?
More to the point: it’s wild how rapidly “grooming” has been rocketed through the concept-creep wormhole, and can now just be casually used to encompass whenever an adult kinda feels bad about something that went on sexually / romantically / emotionally. This is so many light-years beyond what had previously been the uncontroversial normative conception of “grooming” that it’d be really funny if it wasn’t so dark. (OK, it’s still funny.)
See this 2018 journal article by retired FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, who’d spent decades as the Bureau’s point-person for investigating “child molesters.” In the article, Lanning sets out to systematically delineate the elements of “grooming,” since he’d noticed the term seemed to be exploding in popularity, and taking on usages so radically removed from what he’d previously understood as its accepted definition: when legitimately predatory adults employ certain behavioral techniques to habituate actual children into becoming receptive to their illicit sexual advances. Lanning writes:
Although increasingly used, there is still much confusion and disagreement over the precise meaning of the term grooming. It does not have one official, legal, mental health, or even lay definition. Anyone using the term, therefore, should clearly define it and consistently use their definition. Especially problematic for a clear understanding of communication are common terms with a wide range of possible definitions — all correct but often different. The term grooming has become one of these terms. To make this problem even worse, there is essentially no real difference between the definitions of the terms seduction and grooming.
I define grooming/seduction as the use of nonviolent techniques by one person to gain sexual access to and control over potential and actual child victims. The grooming or seduction process usually consists of identifying preferred or acceptable child targets, gathering information about interests and vulnerabilities, gaining access (i.e., sports, religion, education, online computer), filling emotional and physical needs, lowering inhibitions, and gaining and maintaining control (i.e., bonding, competition, challenges, peer pressure, sympathy).
At bottom, Lanning says, “grooming” is essentially interchangeable with “seduction.” The sole reason the term “grooming” can be rightly applied to adult-on-child scenarios is because it’s obviously considered illicit for any adult to ever sexually “seduce” a child. When children are “groomed,” he says, it’s typically by a “process” featuring some combination of “kindness, attention, material enticement, special privilege, and coercion.” But when it comes to adult-on-adult relations, according to Lanning, these very same “processes” may be employed! Which would be considered classic “seduction.” Because in his experience, predatory adults who set about “grooming” children do it in much the same way that adults set about “seducing” one another! “Between two adults or two teenagers,” Lanning says, “it might be considered part of dating.”
BINGO!
Unfortunately for anyone who may have bothered to think about it for two seconds, now engraved forevermore in the canon of “international law” is that conventional techniques of adult romantic seduction may be freely conflated with adult sex pests “grooming” vulnerable children. Thus, international prosecutorial bodies can be validly consigned to years of soul-sucking turmoil over “adult grooming” accusations. The media has played its usual role in facilitating this moral mania overhaul, refracting “adult grooming” to a lay audience with the offending conduct remade as “sexual misconduct,” “sexual assault,” and inevitably — just give it a few more weeks — “rape.”
Maybe on principle, the ICC deserved to be pummeled into crippling dysfunction, or maybe even eliminated entirely — a very good argument could be made! — but why does this always have to be done for the stupidest possible reasons, which solve nothing, and only intensify the salience of the stupidest possible pathologies — coming soon to a more favored institution near you!
That the basis for all this mayhem should’ve been the myopic personal drama of one troubled woman — whose proximity may have caused a lapse in Khan’s judgment — is truly remarkable. Particularly if you force yourself to sit through the only on-record account she’s known to have given of her Khan-related struggles. Perhaps because it’s tricky to synthesize “grooming” into a concise CNN-ready soundbite, the sole tangible instance of sexual interaction she ever really articulated in that interview is one that allegedly took place during an ICC mission to Colombia, sometime in 2023 or 2024, when she would’ve been 36 or 37 years old — during which she at some point wound up inviting Khan to her hotel room, and promptly climbed into bed with him… whereupon… she recounts… “I felt Mr. Khan sort of scooch over in the bed. And he started to put his hand down my leggings to grope me — to put his tongue in my ear. And I didn’t move an inch. Even when I remember, I think his fingernail must have caught my skin. I didn’t flinch — nothing. I just was still. Now, when you take that one incident alone, if you believe someone to be asleep, that is not consent. You cannot consent to that.”
Somehow my initial intuitions about the sheer stupidity of this story were not nearly cynical enough. Because if this is really the defining incident we’re supposed to believe implicates Khan as a serial perpetrator of “non-consensual sexual contact”... and not just because of the overarching “power dynamic” problem, which Sarah maintains rendered all their sexual activity non-consensual anyway, but because in this special episode, she claims she had been “pretending to be asleep,” though she was not in fact asleep. But because Khan must have somehow believed she was asleep, he surely must have known her consent could not be granted — even though she admits she was awake? This is the most egregious example of abuse / assault / misconduct / whatever she was able to confect after thinking about it daily for over two years? This is what makes Karim Khan not just an unwitting transgressor of the latest newfangled “consent” strictures, but a willful and conscious sex assailant? WTF? Am I the one being “gaslit” here???
At this point, let us cast our minds back to October 27, 2024, when the Guardian came out with one of the first public reports that a dreaded “accusation” cycle had commenced:
According to a document seen by the Guardian, the accusations against Khan, 54, include unwanted sexual touching and “abuse” over an extended period. They include an alleged incident in which he is said to have “pressed his tongue” into the woman’s ear. Khan denies such allegations of misconduct.
Omitted from this initial tone-setting report was some potentially illuminating context: that the ear-licking survivor — by her own eventual telling 20 months later! — had been voluntarily lying in bed beside Khan at the time, after she’d accepted him into her upscale Colombian hotel room, located one floor below his, on the stated premise that she was going to take a nap, and he would join her for this nap. And then her ear was mortifyingly licked.
Might’ve been some clarifying context for readers. Oh well.
One of the few moderately useful questions Amanpour managed to ask during the tediously long-winded Sarah interview was the following, thanks to a copy of the top-secret report(s) Amanpour was magically able to obtain:
AMANPOUR: Can I point some things out then, in this idea of — did he think it was consensual? You’ve explained exactly why that couldn’t be possible from your point of view, of course. And afterwards, according to the report, he would ask you whether you were comfortable or uncomfortable with anything he was doing. In other words, after you had these experiences that you allege, he would then say, of course, you’d — I’m paraphrasing, you’d tell me if you’re uncomfortable. Is that correct?
SARAH: He would sometimes mention that, or ask me that question. But if you know Mr. Khan, he’s not expecting a response from you. Mr. Khan does what he wants. And I, again, go back to that moment where I clearly told him, if this continues, I might harm myself.
OK… so… on at least some occasions, Sarah acknowledges Khan would expressly ask her if she was “comfortable” with everything that was going on. Amanpour did not inquire if Sarah had ever responded affirmatively, which might’ve been a solid journalistic followup, since the whole impetus for this interview was ostensibly to detail the “unwanted” and “coerced” sexual contact Sarah’s alleging she’d been ravaged by. Which according to the fearless DropSite crew, “lasted nearly a year, and continued even after she told Khan that his conduct had left her suicidal.” So what about the indeterminate number of months prior to her purportedly telling Khan that she felt bad — perhaps if not “suicidal” — or as she put it to Amanpour, that if “this” went on any longer, she might “do something to herself”? Here’s another potential High IQ journalistic followup: at any time during the nearly full year that she was regularly engaged in these seemingly quite frequent liaisons with Khan, did she ever respond in the affirmative to his proactively-made overtures seeking verbal confirmation of her comfort? I guess we can only speculate.
Actually, scratch that. For your own safety and comfort, it’s probably best not to speculate. Because some NGO thing called “Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice” has already answered all the questions we could possibly have, declaring that the ultimate answer lies in the ICC’s toxic workplace culture, which would’ve made catastrophically unbearable any of Sarah’s adult grooming travails, since the ICC is so well-known as a “rigidly hierarchical institution,” in which injustices like adult grooming are enabled and excused. What a truly hilarious way to describe this clearly walking-on-eggshells / hanging-by-a-thread quasi-prosecutorial entity, headquartered in the Netherlands, brimming as it must be with European Unionized gender-sensitive Liberal International Order types. It’s always the culturally liberal institutions whose dissidents on the lower rungs of the “hierarchy” end up denouncing as the most viciously repressive institutions of all! Reminds me of George Floyd Summer, when 26-year-old digital media staffers would bombastically pout on Twitter that their left-liberal journalism organization was actually Ground Zero for the most savage repression in Modern America. Their editors and peers would then be required to ritualistically validate these grievances, no matter how hallucinatory or ideologically blinkered, even though the pouters were never going to be placated regardless. Some ICC intern could declare tomorrow that the ICC is actually a “grooming gang,” and everyone who’s culturally or institutionally adjacent would have to nod in remorseful agreement.
One might reasonably ask: OK, so what really went on with this whole ICC shitshow? Because it couldn’t really have been all about an “adult grooming” kerfuffle… right? Of course, it’s tempting for a certain cohort of online commenters to immediately leap to the “Israel did it!” conclusion. Which increasingly explains everything that ever goes wrong anywhere. At least in this instance, Israel-related shenanigans are not some freakoid fever-dream — the Netanyahu arrest warrant sought by Khan, and the backlash this engendered, clearly did play some role in the overall shitshow chronology. And there was never any doubt that Israel would swiftly exploit whatever vulnerabilities might surface in the ICC operation — just like any defendant would do, frankly, if the person or agency trying to prosecute them had vulnerabilities exposed. But there was no way for Israel to surreptitiously engineer what was obviously the paramount factor here: an institutional culture in which “accusations” are just never going to be handled rationally. Whether it’s the ICC, or other places with broadly similar cultural profiles (see: Democratic Party, affiliated NGOs, myriad interlocking EU satellites) where at minimum, the default expectation should be that no matter how trivial or crazed the “accusation,” it will inevitably spiral out of control. Maybe on occasion there can be miraculous exceptions, and the damage can be somewhat contained, but as a baseline assumption, you really just have to brace for the maximally irrational outcome. And when you add in the extraneous political stuff — like, say, a Maine Senate Race ascribed with big national import, or god forbid Israel/Palestine — forget it. Just throw in the towel, go into hiding, kill yourself, etc.
An examination of the recent institutional record shows that even preceding Khan’s tenure, which started in 2021, the ICC’s culture was deemed so menacing to women that an urgent directive was issued — by some interchangeable entity that’d been tasked with issuing such directives, and was comprised of literal self-described “Experts,” who proclaimed:
Decisive action needs to follow the ASP’s and Court’s commitment to ensuring gender equality and providing a welcoming environment for all individuals affiliated with the Court. The Experts make a number of findings and recommendations throughout the Report addressing gender inequality, particularly in senior positions, through measures relating to elections, recruitment, working environment, training and professional development. Targeted interventions for gender equality should be complemented by gender mainstreaming. Attention should further be given to ensuring the dignity, wellbeing, safety and inclusion of LGBTIQ+ individuals in the Court’s working environment. The Experts welcome in this regard the ICCQ, an informal sexual and gender diversity network at the Court. In pursuing these goals, the Court should make use of dedicated focal points on gender issues, and sexual and other forms of harassment, best practices and expertise of specialised external partners, such as UN Women and dedicated NGOs.
One can only imagine the discussions that must go on at the “informal sexual and gender diversity network” that apparently exists in or around the International Criminal Court. Surely whenever some controversy arises, it’s met with a sober and deliberative conflict-resolution process, carried out in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order or an appropriate Dutch equivalent. Surely, there is no steadier or more reliable “network” to which ideas for “best practices” could be outsourced.
We’re led to believe this 2020 investigation had to be urgently launched because previously, the ICC HQ was a cesspool of hyper-aggressive sexual impunity, with “bullying and harassment” allowed to run rampant, in large measure because of what the Report describes as “a certain lack of gender balance” at the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) — even though “the gender distribution in the OTP appears to be close to 50/50.” Because notwithstanding this near-perfect “balance,” there remained “almost a complete absence of women in senior positions — which is a general issue across the Court.” Does anyone want to take a wild guess at what gender the next Chief Prosecutor will be, once she/her/they emerges from the wreckage of the Khan demolition? The Report continues:
The Experts heard many accounts of bullying behaviour amounting to harassment in all Organs of the Court, though particularly in the OTP. They also heard frequent complaints that the culture of the Court’s workplace was adversarial and implicitly discriminatory against women. They heard a number of accounts of sexual harassment, notably uninvited and unwanted sexual advances from more senior male staff to their female subordinates. Female interns seemed to be particularly vulnerable to such approaches, underlining the extent to which this phenomenon, not just at the Court, but in business, government, law, academia and many other professional environments around the world, frequently has more to do with power relationships than with mutual attraction.
“Implicitly discriminatory”? Well, that should be a cinch to eradicate! Probably just need a few more bureaucratic tweaks. “Adversarial”? You mean like… in a courtroom? Also, sorry to belabor the point, but isn’t the whole reason why “sexual advances” are generally initiated because sexual interest may not have been explicitly “invited,” but still might be prospectively welcomed, and so once the advance is made, the recipient can either accept or refuse it, depending on whether they deem it “wanted” or “unwanted”? Eh… nevermind.
BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE… UGH… SUBSCRIBE FOR PART TWO, COMING SHORTLY, WHICH WILL BE PAYWALLED. YES, SORRY, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY ME FOR SLOGGING THROUGH THIS BULLSHIT
Michael, I would never have epithetized you as "Bringer of Joy" but I pretty much laughed my way through this and it made a hilarious start to my day.
The stuff you're great at, you're really great at. You wield a big skewer and you skew with it equal to a masterful knight with a sword.
If this weren't so serious it would be hilarious. This isn't a Senate race where this kind of silly stuff goes on all the time. This is a man who has been removed from his job without the kind of legal process that is due for justice's sake.