© Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty ImagesThree women have accused Tariq Ramadan of raping them in separate attacks in France and Switzerland.
It is the biggest repercussion of the #MeToo movement in France: the influential Swiss-born academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, has spent the past nine months on remand in prison after two French women accused him of raping them in hotel rooms in Paris and Lyon.
Ramadan denies rape, the women stand by their allegations, but in recent weeks the case has increasingly played out in the public arena. Supporters of the well-known academic, who has spoken out against restrictions on the Muslim headscarf in France, say the justice system there is biased against him. They say the 56-year-old father of four is the victim of a conspiracy, has not been given due process and should not be on remand in jail, where he is being treated for multiple sclerosis in a hospital wing.
Lawyers for the Muslim women who accuse him insist it is a case of vulnerable women being raped by a powerful man.
Henda Ayari, 41, a former Salafist Muslim who is
now a feminist activist, went to police last November and accused Ramadan of rape, sexual violence, harassment and intimidation. She said he raped her in a hotel room in the east of Paris in spring 2012 during a conference where he was speaking. "He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die," she told Le Parisien newspaper.
Comment: Next we'll hear from the radical left that the Naxalites are 'just doing communism wrong'.