It was a puzzling feeling. For an entire year, photos of her had blanketed the Chinese internet. Like tens of millions of other Chinese, I had watched and rewatched surveillance video of her in this very building. She was one of the most talked about and mysterious women in China, and I thought I knew what she looked like. In the video, she wanders the halls of a mazelike building, with a man trailing along. They get in and out of several elevators. She seems unsure about how to get to her apartment.
She wears striking waist-length hair and a long, dark knit dress. But on a morning in early August, she greeted me in a loosefitting checkered dress. Now 22, she looked pale and nervous. Her lips were chapped. She invited me upstairs, and began an intense conversation that continued for 18 straight hours. In the summer of , Ms. The executive, known as Liu Qiangdong in China and Richard Liu in the English-speaking world, was arrested by Minneapolis police and released within 24 hours.
He and Ms. Liu are not related. He insisted that the sex was consensual, and prosecutors declined to charge him. In April, Ms. Liu accused Mr. But hers is not a typical MeToo story. After her name became common knowledge on the Chinese internet, Ms. Liu was widely called a slut, a whore, a liar, a gold digger and many other things.
It may be difficult for Westerners to grasp the scale and intensity of her online shaming. But the Monica Lewinsky frenzy is a good comparison, had it taken place in the era of Twitter and YouTube in a country with million internet users and no independent news media.
When Ms. Liu and I met, it was the first time she had ever spoken to an English-language publication about what she has endured. In her apartment, a square-foot studio, Ms.
