The message was only online for a few minutes, but its shock waves have reverberated around the world.
“I was so scared that afternoon,” tennis player Peng Shuai wrote in her Nov. 2 message on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. “I never gave consent, crying the entire time.”
Peng, a former world No. 1–ranked doubles player who has won championships at Wimbledon and the French Open, said she was sexually assaulted by one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most prominent people: Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier of China and previous member of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee.