A 22-year-old New York-based woman is accusing Minister of Local Government Nigel Dharamlall of harassing her for sexual relations at a time when she was vulnerable and in a depressed state.
She had shared the information about her depressed state with the Minister whom she met on Facebook.
Stabroek News made attempts to contact Dharamlall on his mobile number for comment over a two-day period but there was no answer. A call yesterday to the Minister’s office saw this reporter speaking to a woman who identified herself as his Personal Assistant Quini Edmund.
The reporter identified herself and stated that she was employed with Stabroek News. The personal assistant informed that Dharamlall was out of town and that he would not be back in office until probably April 5th. She was told the nature of the call and given the reporter’s number and was asked to convey same to the Minister. She also confirmed the number the newspaper dialed during the two-day period was indeed the cellular number of the Minister.
The woman, Shanaz Hussain, is calling on President Irfaan Ali to investigate the Minister with the expectation that he will be removed from public office. Hussain has also released a voice note with a voice sounding like the Minister in which he said he was busy with a big energy conference that was being held in Guyana. An energy conference was being held in Guyana at the time.
President Ali was asked about the issue on Wednesday by journalist Denis Chabrol on the sidelines of a Guyana Defence Force event. The President suggested that the woman needs to report the matter to the police even as he revealed that the Minister had said that he had lost his personal phone. But even as he said that, the President also said that Dharamlall also had some allegations about the “totality of the conversation”.
“Now there is a procedure in dealing with all these matters, you agree with me? I can’t, if I am to look at social media every day, I can’t run an operation based on social media. There is a procedure in dealing with these matters…so those procedures have to be utilized and followed,” the President said when asked about the matter.
Asked what the procedures are the President responded “If someone has an allegation against somebody, in whatever shape and form, they have to report those allegations, they have to report those allegations because the Minister would have said to me that his phone was lost.
“He also have some allegations of his own that he is making in terms of the totality of the conversation that took place,” the President said in the recording of the interview provided by his office.
“I am not going to be the judge of that on any side. But if there is an allegation, there is a place in which those allegations has to be made”, he added.
Chabrol pressed “Meaning the police?”
“That is where allegations are reported, if something is wrong, someone is done or something is wrong or somebody feels aggrieved that their rights have been breached that is where they have to report. Not, I can’t deal with social media reports, okay. Even if someone is malicious against you Chabrol on social media you have to go and make the report based on the laws that are available. And then the totality of what took place has to be investigated,” the President answered.
The women’s arm of the Alliance For Change (AFC) has since written to the President asking him to investigate Dharamlall but following his comments on Wednesday when asked about the issue they said they will now engage international bodies.
Conversations
According to Hussain, who told Stabroek News that she had never visited Guyana but her now deceased father was Guyanese, Dharamlall inboxed after she had commented on a photograph he had posted on his Facebook page on January 7th this year. She said that because her father was Guyanese she has added many Guyanese to her page including the Minister. At the time of adding she said that while she realised from his posts that he was a politician she did not know he was a Minister. This is apparent from a screenshot of a conversation when she asked who he was and he said that he was a senior government minister and detailed his portfolio.
Sharing the screenshots of the conversations they had over a near two-month period, Hussain told the Minister that her asthmatic father, a medical doctor who was on the COVID-19 frontlines had died from the virus in January of 2021. She shared how depressed she was over the fact that his one-year death anniversary was approaching and also instances of her being bullied when she moved to St Lucia, where she was born, because of the colour of her skin.
The Minister told her that he had also been stricken with COVID-19 in January of last year and that he was asthmatic and listed an inhaler he said saved his life.
Over the period of communication, the young woman was invited to Guyana and there were sexual innuendos with at least one photograph of the Minister appearing to be in bed. The woman said she also shared a photograph with the Minister.
Hussain told Stabroek News that she did eventually book a flight to Guyana and the Minister made reservations at a named city hotel. But she later had some doubts and confided in a friend who dissuaded her and put her in contact with two other women who advised against her going.
There are conversations coinciding with the Minister’s recent visit to New York when he invited the woman to meet him there but she did not accept the invitation. It was shortly after he returned on March 3rd the woman said she informed the Minister that she was no longer coming to Guyana because she had heard reports about him. She then discontinued communications with him.
Post
Hussain told Stabroek News she had also made a post on International Women’s Day, observed on March 8th, condemning all forms of violence and it was three days after that post that Dharamlall updated his Facebook profile photograph indicating that his account had been hacked.
A few days later she made a post indicating that she was going to release screen shots of the conversation as she gave some details about the exchange over the period. She did not name Dharamlall but according to the woman he later unfriended her and blocked her.
The woman said since she made the post she has received several messages, some threatening and the entire situation has scared her and made her even more depressed. The woman later also confided in her mother, a St Lucian, who has since made an extensive post on her daughter’s Facebook age decrying the communication and calling out Dharamlall.
Since making the post Hussain said she has sent screen shots of the conversation to at least three Government officials here but they have not responded. She said another government official reached out to her and she shared the screenshots with her. That government official then asked her what she wanted and offered to have social worker speak with her.
However, Hussain said she informed the government official that she wanted the screenshots to be sent to the President for him to see “what kind of person he has working for him”.
“I want him to investigate him and see what kind of man he is. He preyed upon me at my most vulnerable,” the woman asserted.
Dharamlall was at the centre of a major controversy during the last sitting of Parliament when he told a woman MP that “`You got to get a dildo, that’s what you looking for”.
