By HUIZHONG WU
Associated Press
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — A former employee of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba accused her then-manager of trying to rape her while on a business trip last year, as she urged police to review the rare spotlighted allegations about jobs in the country Site harassment.
The employee, a woman surnamed Zhou, claimed in a lengthy account posted last week that there were inconsistencies in police statements about the case, which she said led online victims to accuse her. A week earlier, a second man in the case was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexual assault.
Last year, the high-profile case sparked a national discussion about workplace sexual harassment and highlighted the struggles and backlash victims faced when allegations were made.
The former Alibaba employee accused her former manager of attempting to rape her while she was drunk or even unconscious.
Alibaba has fired Zhou He, whose surname is only Wang, in the police statement. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zhou criticized the official police account for changing her manager from “a person with objective criminal intent, a rapist with actual criminal intent, to a good boss who takes care of a drunk female subordinate”.
“What about me? …I’ve become a slut falsely accusing the male boss she’s been working on,” she continued.
Zhou posted online that after Wang reported the case to the police, he asked another Alibaba employee and his deputy to talk to her. The post said the employee offered her 600,000 yuan ($90,000) to settle the matter privately.
Wang did not respond to a request for comment from his wife, who has become his spokesman, making numerous statements online defending her husband.
Police investigated the two men in the case. Wang was detained for 15 days, but prosecutors did not authorize arrest on formal charges, saying the actions did not constitute a crime.
Zhou and her lawyer asked police last year to review the case and accused Wang of rape, but have yet to receive a response.
The court convicted another man, Zhang Guo, a representative of a supermarket chain negotiating with Alibaba, of forced indecency, saying he had molested Zhou twice — once when she was drunk at dinner, then the first. Two days in her hotel room. .
Her lawyer, Du Peng, said Zhou had appealed his 18-month sentence for a longer sentence.
In her post, Zhou questioned the police’s account of what happened that night.
She wrote that her former manager stole her ID, asked the hotel to give him the key to her room, and asked staff to list him as a fellow traveler. She also said that when the front desk called to ask her permission to give him a key, police concluded that she could not articulate what she meant.
“He voluntarily cancelled his cab on the app, took my stolen ID, went back to the hotel and joined my room, sexually assaulted me,” she told The Associated Press, detailing her post.
“All of this suggests that not only did he intentionally attempt to rape, but he also committed a criminal act.”
A police statement last August said Wang had the keys made with Zhou’s consent and had her ID, but did not say how he got it.
Police in Jinan, where the attack occurred, did not respond to a request for comment.
The wives of both defendants have denied Zhou’s allegations online. They insist that it was Zhou who seduced their husbands.
Wang’s wife wrote after Zhang was sentenced: “All of this was voluntary by Zhou, and he suffered by himself. A small article full of lies to frame Zhang and Wang.”
While many online commentators have supported Zhou and praised her for speaking out, others have used his wife’s denials to label Zhou as sexually promiscuous.
Zhou has written about how abandoned she felt after the company initially apologized but later fired her.
She said she developed a mood disorder after going public and that both she and her husband attempted suicide. Police then kept them in the hotel for a month to make sure they didn’t try again, she said. They also told her not to give media interviews.
“I hope I get a fair outcome so that victims don’t despair of the justice system,” she said.
