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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS