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.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the