LA Times China journalist who quit over sexual misconduct inquiry given voice by Weinstein accuser

‘I want people to start thinking’, Victoria’s Secret model Ambra Gutierrez tells Jonathan Kaiman in podcast. He reveals thoughts of suicide, and says ‘I hope more men will feel comfortable to say they did wrong’

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Model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. A recent episode of her podcast In Our Words featured Jonathan Kaiman, who quit as the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau chief over sexual misconduct claims. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:30pm, 3 Oct 2018Updated: 12:48pm, 4 Oct 2018

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez was one of the first women to publicly accuse Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct in 2015, a development that led to the birth of the #MeToo movement.

Now, the 26-year-old Filipino-Italian Victoria’s Secret model has given a voice to a man whose career crashed and burned in China after he was accused by two women of sexual misconduct this year.

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Jonathan Kaiman quit as president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) in January after former flatmate Laura Tucker posted an account online of an alleged 2013 incident in which she said Kaiman pressured her into having sex.

In August he resigned from his job as Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times under pressure, he says, after being suspended in May when a second allegation was made against him. Felicia Sonmez, a Washington Post reporter, wrote an email to the FCCC board saying she felt pressured into having sex with Kaiman after they went to his apartment after the FCCC’s summer party in September 2017.

Jonathan Kaiman and his girlfriend, Charlotte Arneson. “I do not think people should be defined by their mistakes,” Arneson says.

Gutierrez interviewed Kaiman in New York for the latest podcast in her In Our Words series, which was broadcast last week, in which he spoke publicly for the first time about his #MeToo experience.

“I want to give you the space to talk with me, and see what you went through after this, and if it could help to understand all the situation, as there are always two different sides,” Gutierrez told Kaiman in the podcast.