Manohara Pinot Wrote Two Words on a Napkin in Eyeliner. They Said Help Me.

At sixteen, Manohara Odelia Pinot traveled to Malaysia to meet a prince's parents. During the visit she was told she would be marrying their son that month. She laughed - she thought it was a joke. The invitations, she was told, had already gone out. She went through with the ceremony on one promise: that afterward she could go home to Jakarta. Nine months later, in a restaurant in Singapore, she slid a businessman a napkin with two words on it, written in eyeliner.

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Manohara Odelia Pinot, an Indonesian model with an American father, was sixteen when she married Tengku Muhammad Fakhry Petra, the third son of the Sultan of Kelantan, on 26 August 2008. She said she was kept under supervision in Kelantan, that her passport was held by others, that she was pulled onto a private jet at a Jeddah airport while her mother was left on the tarmac, and that inside the royal household she was assaulted, injected with an unidentified substance and cut with a razor. She also alleged Fakhry raped her on a boat trip before the wedding. Fakhry denied every allegation through his lawyer. She got out in Singapore on 31 May 2009, at seventeen, after passing a note to the businessman Dato Kadar Shah and then pressing a hotel elevator's emergency button; Singapore police, her mother and United States embassy officials were involved in her departure. She filed a police complaint in Jakarta that June; Fakhry filed his own report in Kuala Lumpur accusing her of false allegations, and in July 2009 sued her and her mother for defamation in Malaysia, seeking 105 million ringgit. After their lawyers withdrew and no replacements were appointed, the court entered judgment in default against them on 5 November 2009 and, on 11 March 2010, set damages at 6 million ringgit - about 1.8 million US dollars. No criminal court ever tried the abuse allegations, which remain disputed. Manohara maintained her account and said she would not pay the award.

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This account is built from Manohara's own interviews after her return, including her interview with Malaysiakini, from her mother Daisy Fajarina's public statements, from contemporaneous reporting in the Indonesian and Malaysian press and the Los Angeles Times, and from the record of the Malaysian defamation proceedings.

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This episode describes allegations of sexual and physical violence against a teenager. Manohara was sixteen and seventeen during the events recounted here and is named because she spoke about them publicly under her own name; her sister is not named.