Ellen ten Damme is being badly smeared by Ali B’s team. Why did she finish recording his TV show if he raped her? “The show must go on.“
The appeal in the abuse case against Ali B is in full swing and the rapper is determined to portray his victims as unreliable. The rapper has been found guilty of the attempted rape of Ellen ten Damme during the recording of the AvroTros program Ali B and the Music Caravan. Complete nonsense, he thinks.
Flirty atmosphere
According to Ali, there was simply a ‘flirty atmosphere’. He showed a self-edited video in court in which statements in Ellen’s police statement are mixed with images from the program. For example, after the quote: ‘I was very upset the next day’, you can see a fragment of her laughing in that show.
Ruth Jager, Ellen’s lawyer, finds that disgusting. “I thought that was terrible. We have already seen those images in court. I thought that after what we said about it in court: the defense is not going to do that again, but yes, it happened again,” she says at Pauw & De Wit.
One second
It was a TV set full of expectations and obligations, Ruth emphasizes. “A day of recordings were made for a television program. That night that this happened, Ellen thought for one second about: what should I do with this? Am I going to report it? Am I going to do something with this? And immediately afterwards she thought: what am I getting myself into?”
“She thought: I’m not going to do that! I’m not going to do anything with this! But then you are an artist, you are on a program and the next day Ali B’s wife comes with the children and there is a staff of thirty people. She thought: I have to continue. Then it is: the show must go on. Then you laugh, then you dance, then you sing.”
‘Here she is laughing!’
Ruth is disgusted by Ali’s team. “What really bothers me is that the defense then says: ‘But look, here she is laughing! How is it possible that she was raped the night before?’ I countered that Ellen has been diagnosed with cancer three times and that same evening that she was diagnosed with cancer, she was standing in the theater, dancing.”
“Even then she was laughing and singing in front of an audience. I think people who know her well could see that she was not feeling well, but someone who doesn’t know her doesn’t see that.”
That Ali’s team comes up with this? “I just resent it.”
