JD.com founder Richard Liu’s rape accuser says she was lured to dinner
- Alleged victim was invited to Liu’s party by another CEO and ‘forced’ to drink
It was a Thursday evening in late August and a crowd had gathered at the Origami sushi restaurant in Minneapolis. One guest, a 21-year-old female Chinese undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, was initially expecting a dinner in honour of volunteers like herself.
Instead, she found herself surrounded by more than a dozen Chinese executives, male attendees of a doctoral management programme for which she had been volunteering. Among them was Charlie Yao, a Chinese businessman she had met days earlier – and who had invited her to the dinner.
Yao asked her to take a seat next to Richard Liu Qiangdong, one of China’s wealthiest men and the chief executive of e-commerce giant JD.com. The student’s male guest was relegated to another table, alongside the executives’ assistants.
This account is based on documents, the female student’s statement to the police and her WeChat messages to a friend, which were reviewed by Bloomberg. Her lawyer, Wil Florin, also talked to Bloomberg.
The role played by Yao in inviting the student to the dinner, outlined here for the first time, sheds new light on the events that unfolded on August 30 and culminated early the following morning, when the young woman alleges that she was raped by Liu in her apartment. Liu has denied the allegations. Yao, who has not been accused of wrongdoing by authorities, could not be reached for comment.
Over the course of the evening, wine flowed freely. Liu and other men at the table repeatedly toasted the woman, using the Chinese phrase “ganbei", or “dry cup”, a strong encouragement in Chinese social and business settings to leave one’s glass empty.
