Peng Shuai broke the silence. For her first speech since her accusations of sexual assault against former Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, the former tennis player reconsidered her remarks and spoke of “misunderstandings” around a “d ‘private order’.
His post on Chinese social network Weibo in early November rocked much of the country. Peng Shuai had notably claimed to have had a forced “sexual” relationship with Zhang Gaoli. If her message was quickly erased from the network by Chinese censorship, the winner of Roland Garros in 2014 in doubles had disappeared, causing great concern around the world.
She reappeared almost three weeks later, via videos still posted on social networks. But the images of the champion had not reassured so far, nor her exchange with the President of the IOC Thomas Bach and the copy of an email in which she said that “everything is fine”.
More than a month and a half after the start of the affair, she gave her first interview, filmed with a cell phone, to the Singaporean newspaper Lianhe Zaobao on the sidelines of a sporting event organized on Sunday in Shanghai. And she denied being sexually assaulted. “First, I want to stress a very important point: I never said or wrote that someone had sexually assaulted me,” she said. There has been “a lot of misunderstanding” on a “private” matter, she added, also assuring that it is “free”.
The WTA still worried
A few hours earlier, a Chinese journalist for the nationalist daily Global Times had posted on Twitter a new video of the player a few seconds in the company of former basketball player Yao Ming.
But all this is not enough to allay the concern around Peng Shuai, especially with the WTA. “These appearances do not allay the concerns of the WTA about its well-being and its ability to communicate without censorship or coercion,” said Monday in a statement the organization which decided, in early December, to cancel all of her tournaments in China due to persistent “serious doubts” about the player’s freedom.