Steamy sex videos of a cosmetic surgeon and his celebrity patients indulging in more than the standard nip and tuck have gripped the devoutly Roman Catholic Philippines.
Home movies showing Hayden Kho going beyond the usual doctor-patient boundaries with a rising film star and commercial model are spreading around the Internet, as hawkers on Manila’s street corners sell DVDs of their trysts.
The videos and the manner in which they came into the public domain have fascinated and repulsed this deeply religious country.
PHOTO: AFP
One of the unwitting stars of the films is up-and-coming actress Katrina Halili, 23, who has now filed a criminal complaint.
Halili is the only woman who has identified herself as one of four appearing separately with Kho in the videos.
“I fully gave my heart and soul to a man who was doing his own movie,” she said. “In our culture, this will stigmatize me for life.”
She now has what many young actresses aspire to — instant name recognition — but for all the wrong reasons. In a country that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stanley Karnow once described as “300 years in a Catholic convent and 50 years in Hollywood” this fame is working against her.
This week workers began pulling down from Manila’s main avenue a large billboard of Halili endorsing a popular local brand of lingerie.
The young actress later confirmed she had lost an endorsement contract and that film and modeling offers had also dried up since the tapes went public.
Kho, 29, has issued a public apology and suspended his medical practice as calls increase for him to have his license revoked — all the while insisting he was not the one who made the recordings public.
Now suspicion has shifted to the cuckolded boyfriends or girlfriends — or their associates — of some of the personalities in the videos.
Fifty-something Vicki Belo, another cosmetic surgeon to Filipino movie stars and one-time lover of Kho, said she learnt of her estranged boyfriend’s activities with other women from video files stored on her clinic’s computer.
But despite saying in a sworn statement that she was aware Kho had made a similar recording of their own lovemaking, Belo has denied spreading the videotapes of Kho having sex with the younger women.
Recording the videos and making them public without the women’s consent “is a form of violence,” said Sylvia Claudio of the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s Studies.
“We’re seeing that even with this new technology, it still tends to go along the lines of old problems. Women’s status is low in society, so we see this new technology where a lot of women are being hurt,” she said in a television forum on the controversy.
Halili is now appealing for the public to stop watching the recordings, saying: “You also have daughters, sisters, girlfriends, wives.”
But so far, her appeal has fallen on deaf ears. A middle-aged street vendor who would identify himself only by his first name, Jose, openly hawked a Katrina-Hayden Scandal video disc outside Manila’s largest shopping mall, alongside his usual fare of pirated copies of Hollywood films.
“It’s all over the Internet now, so sales are not that brisk as last week. But people still come here to buy them,” Jose said.
A blue-collar worker who called himself “Joe” said he bought a copy because he had no Internet access.
“Every red-blooded Filipino male dreams of being in bed with Katrina Halili,” he said.
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and
Ten cheetah cubs held in captivity since birth and destined for international wildlife trade markets have been rescued in Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia. They were all in stable condition despite all of them having been undernourished and limping due to being tied in captivity for months, said Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which is caring for the cubs. One eight-month-old cub was unable to walk after been tied up for six months, while a five-month-old was “very malnourished [a bag of bones], with sores all over her body and full of botfly maggots which are under the
BRUSHED OFF: An ambassador to Australia previously said that Beijing does not see a reason to apologize for its naval exercises and military maneuvers in international areas China set off alarm bells in New Zealand when it dispatched powerful warships on unprecedented missions in the South Pacific without explanation, military documents showed. Beijing has spent years expanding its reach in the southern Pacific Ocean, courting island nations with new hospitals, freshly paved roads and generous offers of climate aid. However, these diplomatic efforts have increasingly been accompanied by more overt displays of military power. Three Chinese warships sailed the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand in February, the first time such a task group had been sighted in those waters. “We have never seen vessels with this capability
‘NO INTEGRITY’: The chief judge expressed concern over how the sentence would be perceived given that military detention is believed to be easier than civilian prison A military court yesterday sentenced a New Zealand soldier to two years’ detention for attempting to spy for a foreign power. The soldier, whose name has been suppressed, admitted to attempted espionage, accessing a computer system for a dishonest purpose and knowingly possessing an objectionable publication. He was ordered into military detention at Burnham Military Camp near Christchurch and would be dismissed from the New Zealand Defence Force at the end of his sentence. His admission and its acceptance by the court marked the first spying conviction in New Zealand’s history. The soldier would be paid at half his previous rate until his dismissal
RSS