Teen escapes ‘abusive’ prince

JAKARTA – A teenage US-Indonesian model has returned to her family in Indonesia with tales of abuse, rape and torture at the hands of a Malaysian prince, after her dramatic escape with the help of Singapore police.

Manohara Odelia Pino, 17, told reporters she was treated like a sex slave after her marriage to Tengku Temenggong Mohammad Fakhry, the prince of Malaysia’s Kelantan state, last year.
Her mother, Daisy Fajarina, said she would press charges against the prince and blamed the Malaysian and Indonesian governments for trying to cover up the abuse. ‘The things I’ve been afraid of were revealed to be true. Manohara has suffered physical abuse. She’s got several razor cuts on her chest,’ Fajarina told AFP yesterday.
‘I will sue him. No parent could be silent if their child was treated in such a barbaric way.’
The Malaysian government had ignored her pleas for access to her daughter and had blocked her from entering the country, she said, while the Indonesian embassy had said that Manohara was fine with her new husband.
‘I am still traumatised by all that happened and it has left an impact on me,’ she told reporters in Jakarta on Sunday, after escaping the royal family during a trip to Singapore over the weekend.
‘Sexual abuse and sexual harassment were like a daily routine for me, and he did that every time I did not want to have sexual intercourse,’ she was quoted as saying in The Jakarta Globe.
Manohara said she was forced to pretend she was happy with the prince and to attend social functions with him as his happy young bride. She said she secretly called Singaporean police and pleaded for help after the royal family took her to the city state when they accompanied Fakhry’s father, Sultan Ismail Petra Shah II, for medical treatment. A spokesperson for the Indonesian foreign ministry said the government would help Manohara if she wanted to file charges against her husband.
– Nampa-AFP