The woman attacked inside a bathroom stall at S4 over the weekend told Dallas Voice today (Tuesday, Jan. 19), that the attack “went way beyond sexual assault. It was a rape.”
Prince Karim, suspect in rape at S4
The young woman, whose name is being withheld for her privacy, said she went to the Cedar Springs nightclub Saturday night, Jan. 16, with her female fiancee and her fiancee’s co-worker. She had become separated from them in the crowd when she met Prince Karim, a 31-year-old Middle Eastern man that she assumed — based on the way he was dressed, his hairstyle and the fact that he was in a gay bar — was a gay man.
The woman said she and Karim went out onto the S4 patio to smoke, and that while they were there, she realized that he was not gay and that he was hitting on her. “He told me he loves black women [the victim is black] and that he isn’t gay. He asked me if I had thought he was gay and if he looked gay. I told him yes, and that if he didn’t want people to think he was gay, maybe he should dress differently.”
The woman said she went back inside the club then to try to get away from Karim, but that he followed her inside. She said she was on her phone, calling and texting her fiancee and their friend to tell them he was following her and she had become afraid of him. When she couldn’t find her fiancee right away, the woman said she went into the bathroom — not realizing it was a unisex bathroom — to try and escape Karim.
“But he started following me inside. I pushed him out and said, ‘You can’t come in here,'” the woman said. “But he followed me in.”
She said she went into the stall and stood with her back to the door to keep him out. But Karim, she said, then crawled underneath the wall and into the stall with her, where he raped her. “They are saying it was a sexual assault,” the distraught woman said. “This goes way beyond just an assault. This was rape.”
The woman reported the assault to S4 security personnel who found Karim and held him until police arrived. He was jailed at Dallas County Jail on $25,000 bond, but appears to have posted bond and been released.
The victim said that Karim told her he lives in Los Angeles and was visiting Dallas “just partying with his cousin.” However, a public records search incidates that a man named Prince Karim, with the same birthdate as the arrested suspect, lives in an apartment in Southwest Arlington and has a Texas driver’s license.
The victim also said that the photo of Karim supplied by Dallas police “is not the same photo of him that they gave me. That’s not what he looked like that night. It’s not what he looked like when he was arrested.” (The photo with this post is the photo provided by Dallas police. We will update the post with the other photo once we receive it.)
Dallas PD’s LGBT Liaison Officer Laura Martin has pointed out that “sexual assault” and “rape” are two different terms for the same thing. “Sexual assault” is the penal code language for “rape,” and any forced sexual contact is considered rape. For a complete legal definition, check here, and scroll down Section 22.011.