Throw the book at Anand Jon

Yeah, I don’t have much sympathy for creepy modelizers. The modeling industry has enough problems, we don’t need to add sexual perverts or serial rapists to the mix.
According to the LA Times,

He was touted as the next big thing, an up-and-coming clothes designer who landed a prime spot as a guest on a reality fashion television show.
But prosecutors told jurors that designer Anand Jon was in reality a “serial rapist” who exploited his position in the glamour industry to lure young aspiring models to his Beverly Hills apartment, where he lived out his sexual fantasies in a series of assaults.

As his trial began Friday in a Los Angeles courtroom, Jon, 34, sat quietly in a pinstriped Ralph Lauren suit while prosecutors played a homemade videotape they said showed him asking a 17-year-old to strip before sexually abusing her.
In graphic detail, prosecutors told jurors about eight other women — as young as 14 — whom Jon is charged with attacking. They said he kept a “brag list” in which he detailed his encounters and sometimes the ages of his “conquests.”

His defense attorney is claiming that because some of the victims continued contact with him they were obviously consenting. Which is a problematic assumption because it hinges on the belief that you can’t be assaulted by someone you know or have an intimate relationship with. Which is untrue, most sexual assault happens with someone you know, usually intimately. And as the Radar Online reports,

Still, it’s not hard to imagine how a young girl who is all alone in a foreign city might not be so willing to run away from the only person she knows–a person who is promising to “make” her, mind you–even if that person just assaulted her. In fact, it brings to mind another high-profile rape case, the one involving Jeffrey J. Marsalis in Philadelphia. Marsalis met dozens of women on match.com and allegedly raped them, though some continued to hang out with him afterward and even dated him.

Either way, his treatment of the models he is “taking on” is less then desirable and needs to be prosecuted. Manipulating young underage women, having them perform sex acts-all while claiming this will give them stardom, is the oldest trick in the book. And who is he anyway? “His fame” is a crappy defense, since he is not that famous. That is no way to say, that even if he was that famous, it would be a good excuse, but seriously, I have never heard of him. South Asians don’t get much media coverage, it is sad that this has to be one of the biggest stories.