Written by Elizabeth Paton
This week, Owen Mooney, a male mannequin and graphic designer, stated he was groped by Alexander Wang, an influential clothier, at a New York Metropolis nightclub in 2017.
Mooney made the allegations in a few movies he posted on social media. Quickly after, extra allegations of sexual assault and non-consensual encounters had been made in opposition to the 37-year-old designer, posted on Instagram accounts that didn’t determine the accusers.
On Thursday, after days of silence, Wang responded to the claims and barrage of criticism he has confronted on-line.
“In the previous couple of days, I’ve been receiving baseless and grotesquely false accusations,” the designer wrote in an announcement despatched to The New York Instances. “These claims have been unfairly amplified by notorious social media accounts for posting defamatory materials from undisclosed and / or nameless sources with none proof or factual verification.”
The allegations had been compiled and posted on Instagram by two widely-followed accounts which have established themselves as watchdogs of the style trade: Food regimen Prada, run by Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler, and one other account devoted to exposing the internal workings of the style trade. modeling trade. The New York Instances has not independently corroborated the allegations. Mooney didn’t reply to e-mail and direct message requests for remark.
In 2019, Azealia Banks, a rapper and songwriter who was Wang’s muse and collaborator, shared quite a lot of nameless accounts on her Instagram tales about allegations of groping by the designer. In 2017, an individual named Nick Ward posted a Twitter thread claiming that Wang grabbed his genitals at a Brooklyn live performance.
In his assertion, Wang stated that “seeing these lies about me being perpetuated as truths has been infuriating.”
“I by no means engaged within the egregious habits described and would by no means behave within the method alleged,” he continued. “I intend to unravel this and maintain whoever is accountable for originating these claims and brutally spreading them on-line.”
On Monday, Wang’s Instagram account disabled the power to touch upon his newest publish. His model’s official Instagram account did the identical in all of his posts this week.
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