To make the world listen
For Itzel Schnaas, a 31-year-old professional ballet dancer in Mexico City, going public was her insurance policy.
If the plan worked, she believed a world-famous public intellectual, with ties to Mexico’s government and major media conglomerates, would be exposed as a sex offender, and she could be protected from him and his powerful friends. They couldn’t go after her if the world was watching, especially if other women came forward too. On Feb. 15, she posted a nearly seven-minute YouTube video excoriating the man: “It turns out that I had barely been born when you started violating women and sowing fear to obtain their silence, you miserable a--hole,” she says in Spanish. “You ought to be scared of us. Because I am certain that many other women are going to add their accusations to this one.”
They did.
Since then, 36 women have publicly accused Andrés Roemer, leveling charges of sexual harassment, abuse and rape on social media and in the press. At least six have formally accused the 57-year-old before the Mexico City prosecutor’s office, Mexico City’s attorney general confirmed on May 24. In February, UNESCO stripped him of his goodwill-ambassador title, and Columbia University, where he was a visiting scholar, cut ties with him. On May 5, amid reports that Roemer was in Israel, a Mexico City judge issued a warrant for his arrest for rape. His assets were frozen the same day. On May 21, Mexico City’s attorney general announced a second warrant for Roemer’s arrest, and on June 14, she requested that Israel arrest him to allow for quicker extradition. In a three-page letter sent to TIME via a lawyer on June 7, Roemer denied the accusations, concluding: “I have never raped anyone. I have never had sex without consensus. I have never locked a woman in a room. I have never threatened a woman to obtain silence from her. I have
