The leading famous Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, who is previously charged in the case of rapes of two women, has been accused of partaking in a gangrape of a journalist, French judicial sources said on Sunday.
The reports of the gang-rape accusation levelled by a 50-year-old woman on the Muslim academic and a member of his staff when she went to interview the academic at a hotel in Lyon in May 2014 were confirmed by French sources on Europe 1 radio and in Le Journal du Dimanche newspapers. The woman also alleged that Ramadan issued threats and intimidated the journalist from reporting the alleged incident to the police.
Ramadan, whose grandfather founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, worked as a professor at Oxford University until rape allegations surfaced against him during the peak of Me Too movement in 2017. He is alleged to have raped a disabled woman in 2009 and a feminist activist in 2012. The authorities in Switzerland are also probing rape allegations against him after a woman filed a rape complaint against him.
Ramadan was taken into custody in February 2018 and was held in jail for 9 months before being granted bail. In the latest allegations, the woman had alleged that Ramadan and his male assistants had repeatedly raped her in Ramadan’s room in Sofitel hotel in Lyon. The woman further stated that when she told Ramdan that she is going to file a complaint against him, the academic allegedly replied, “You don’t know how powerful I am”. The woman asserted that Ramadan had approached her via a messenger app in January 2019, two months after he secured the bail, claiming that he had some offer of “professional nature” for her.