Max Pearson
speaker
1,342 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 11 Apr
Max Pearson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And over the next three years, nearly 100 witnesses were called to tell their stories of violence and abuse.
So the typical pattern in Sierra Leone would be that a village was captured, some of the women were killed, some were mutilated, others were taken.
Typically there would be gang rapes, very forceful gang rapes that often left them with physical injuries involved.
And then if they were lucky, as one of our witnesses said, they would be taken as a bushwife.
In my mind, that was continuing rape.
The ones who weren't so lucky were kicked around like a football from man to man.
The rebel army used child soldiers, sometimes as young as nine or ten, and often drugged to insensibility, to terrorize whole communities.
Their signature atrocity was the hacking off with machetes of arms and legs.
And you know you have to really respect the tremendous courage, the tremendous resilience of the people who survived these atrocities.
But to get a conviction, Brenda and her team faced a challenge.
Because during the 11-year conflict, Charles Taylor had never set foot in Sierra Leone.
And so why is this man guilty for the crimes committed by others in Sierra Leone?
And so you spend time talking about all of the aiding and abetting that he did, training of the rebel soldiers, giving them safe haven, giving them instructions.
It was basically all denial.
Or, yeah, these things happened, but he didn't know about it.
Or he tried to do things to stop it.
So Brenda's team focused on claims that Charles Taylor traded with the rebels, giving them arms and ammunition in return for so-called blood diamonds mined in Sierra Leone.
But they needed to prove a link in court.
He went on a presidential trip to several countries and we discovered that he had attended a dinner in South Africa as part of this trip, a dinner sponsored by President Nelson Mandela.
And at that dinner was Naomi Campbell.
Showing 701–720 of 1,342 · page 36 of 68
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