Khadija Safdar
š¤ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
What he would do with the women, there's a pattern here, is he would often ask for a massage and then it would escalate into like sexual stuff.
And when they would feel uncomfortable, he would say, that's not going to work if you want a career in modeling.
Like you have to be able to be like really sexually open.
Like let me teach you how to do that.
She actually chalked up a lot of the fact that she was uncomfortable in the beginning to the fact that she was Russian.
She thought maybe in Russia, like maybe I'm just conservative and like I really need to open up here because this is the U.S.
and if I'm going to make it big, I have to listen to this man and listen to what he's telling me to do.
He framed it as an opportunity to get business experience, learn how to interact with world leaders, something that would set her up for something really big in the future.
But over time, what he would be asking her to do was learn how to do massage, learn how to set the table, learn how to cook steak.
So you can sort of see like the decline from somebody who went to an elite university, speaks multiple languages, like was on the track to becoming a top model is now like setting tables for billionaires and serving them.
Did Svitlana ever question her relationship with him?
She said she grew up in a military family.
And in that family, you just don't question authority.
And so when he was like constantly instructing her on what to do, it seemed normal and that she was supposed to just follow his lead.
And she just got used to being told what to do by him, what type of clothes to wear, how to cut her hair, whom to date, whom not to date.
She says that that just like over time just started becoming normal.
Like that's what she was expected to do.
And she says by the time she turned 30, she was so used to him having complete control over everything that she didn't even see or know any life beyond that.
Later on when she started realizing that things were not right, like that was something that she like registered.
He has my photos.