Fashion designer's serial rape case goes to jury
The Associated Press
Article Launched: 10/31/2008 06:30:30 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES—A defense attorney for fashion designer Anand Jon Alexander told jurors Friday in closing arguments that his client should be acquitted of rape charges because his accusers are lying and seeking revenge.

"How many times did you hear 'I don't recall' from them during the trial?" asked defense attorney Leonard Levine. "I stopped counting at 300. These women lied. They lied, they exaggerated and nobody cared—but you should care."

The case now heads to the jury, which will deliberate next week accusations that Alexander raped nine females, most of them aspiring models, at his Beverly Hills apartment.

Levine said the women who testified against Alexander "invited what happened," then made up stories so they could sue Alexander after his criminal case.

Deputy District Attorney Frances Young told jurors Alexander is a "sexual predator," and should be found guilty because he humiliated and degraded naive girls who came to Hollywood with dreams of fame.

"What we heard was four male lawyers defending their male client and what we heard was a lot of misogyny," Young said. "These girls did nothing wrong. None of these girls invited what happened to them."

"This is a very sick man," Young told the jury. "He was an abuser of women who picked a profession where he would be surrounded by teenage girls."

Beverly Hills police began investigating Alexander in March 2007 when a woman reported she had been sexually assaulted
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by the designer in his apartment. Before his arrest in June 2007, Alexander was featured on the TV show, "America's Next Top Model."

He now faces 27 counts, including forcible rape and committing lewd acts on a child, stemming from assaults that allegedly happened between 2001 and 2007. The alleged victims ranged in age from 14 to 21.

If convicted of all counts, Alexander faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Strip mall owners settle race discrimination lawsuit
A couple pays out in a case accusing them of discriminating against a black businesswoman.

By Peter Dujardin | 247-4749
October 16, 2008

HAMPTON - A Korean-American couple who own a gas station and strip mall on Big Bethel Road have agreed to settle a race discrimination lawsuit that accused them of refusing to rent space to a businesswoman because she is black.

Ok Keum Kim and her husband, Jung Hyun Kim — who own the Valero gas station and six other shops at the intersection of Saunders Road — paid "a little more" than $50,000 but less than $75,000 to settle the suit in U.S. District Court, Ok Keum Kim said.

The suit, filed a year ago, had asked for $4 million in damages.

Sonya Swenson — a Korean-American woman from Yorktown who had been leasing the shop from the Kims — said she tried to sell her business, Salon Sonya, to Tiffany Sutton, a black woman from Hampton. But when the Kims learned that Sutton is black, the suit alleged, they refused to allow a lease transfer.

The Kims, who came to the United States in 1975, countered that they were trying to protect another hairdresser — a black woman they've been renting to since 1980. They said they didn't want to set her up for failure by having her compete with another business for the same customers.

"I've been with Mr. and Mrs. Kim for over 25 years," that hairdresser, Hazel King, 74, told the Daily Press last December, calling the suit "silly" and "wrong."

"They've always been fine to me," King said. "They're no kind of racists. No way, no how. Never, never, never."

Kim said Wednesday that when she told King that she settled with Swenson and Sutton, King cried and said, "What did you do that for?" King was not at work Wednesday, but a barber identifying himself as King's son confirmed that story.

Ok Keum Kim still maintains she and her husband did nothing wrong, and said the case "hurt me so much." She said her attorney, Joseph F.Verser, kept advising her to settle. "Everybody was worried about the jury, that the jury might not come out with the right decision," she said.

James H. Shoemaker Jr., an attorney who represented Swenson and Sutton, declined to comment. Another attorney who represented them, William Hoyle Jr., said "the case has been settled" but declined to elaborate. "We are satisfied with the outcome," Hoyle said.

The rental space in question is now rented by a nail salon owned by a Vietnamese woman.

...there’s a tragedy about Barack Obama, because he didn’t have to be a guy who mired himself in all the grim pathologies of the racial grievance industry. I thought when he first appeared on the national stage, that he was a character more like Colin Powell. Colin Powell and Barack Obama are both the children of British subjects. In Colin Powell’s case from the West Indies, in Obama’s case, from Kenya. And the advantage of that is that they’re not part, they’re not part of what we call now the African-American experience. They’re not part of the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton narrative. So there’s something very bizarre about Obama in effect artificially trying to find ways of identifying with that particular, I would regard, that particular self-defeating narrative.