One of the biggest surprises from my journey into Orthodox Judaism is that half of the conversion courts in Los Angeles pressure attractive women into giving sexual favors in exchange for conversion, and that half of the charismatic rabbis I’ve met are sexual predators.
* [Karim] Khan, an observant Muslim, was born in Edinburgh to immigrants from Pakistan. He rose to the upper echelons of British law, representing suspects and victims before the ICC and international tribunals in Cambodia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. He built a reputation for being hard-charging and impulsive, able to charm and bully in the same conversation.
* Two months after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, pressure was mounting on Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as he considered charges against Israeli officials for their conduct of the war in Gaza.
Pro-Palestinian activists who had labeled him a “genocide enabler” and a bloc of ICC member countries in the developing world insisted that action was long overdue, pushing Khan into conflict with Israel’s staunch allies in Washington and other Western capitals.
Khan, a hard-charging British lawyer, was in New York in early December 2023 for the court’s governing body meeting at United Nations headquarters. Stung by the criticism, the 55-year-old prosecutor was increasingly lashing out at his team, according to ICC officials.
One assistant, a woman in her 30s who often traveled with him for her job, asked to meet with Khan to urge him to ease up. He called her that evening to his corner suite high in the Millennium Hilton hotel next to the U.N.
There, she said in testimony to U.N. officials, Khan began to touch her sexually, a pattern of behavior that she said had been going on for months.
She said she attempted to leave the room several times, but he took her hand and eventually pulled her to the bed. Then he pulled off her pants and forced sexual intercourse, according to the testimony.
“He always holds on to me and leads me to the bed,” she said in the testimony, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “It’s the feeling of being trapped.”
The incident is one of multiple allegations of coerced sexual intercourse that the woman has made against Khan, according to documents, her testimony and officials familiar with the allegations. The woman, who is married and has a child, alleges Khan performed nonconsensual sex acts with her on missions to New York, Colombia, Congo, Chad and Paris. Khan also did so multiple times at a residence owned by his wife where he stayed in The Hague, the headquarters of the ICC, according to her testimony.
The woman, a lawyer from Malaysia, stayed at the job because she didn’t want to leave one of the most important offices in human-rights law and worried she wouldn’t be able to pay the medical bills of her mother, who was dying of cancer, according to her testimony and ICC officials. She also came to fear retaliation from Khan, according to interviews with current and former ICC officials.
The accusations facing Khan have become entwined with the international conflict over Gaza. Just 2½ weeks after Khan learned of the allegations against him last spring, he surprised Israeli and U.S. officials by announcing the most dramatic arrest warrant in the court’s history—for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It was the first time in the ICC’s history that the court’s prosecutor sought a warrant for a Western-aligned democratically elected leader, a move the U.S. had been working to avert for months.
The timing of the announcement has spurred questions about whether Khan was aiming to protect himself from the sexual-assault allegations. The day before announcing the warrant application, Khan abruptly canceled a trip to Israel and Gaza that he had previously said was important to make his decision.
