A woman who operated a boarding house for exchange students in Hawaii was charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy.
A woman who operated a boarding house for exchange students in Hawaii was charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy.
Rika Shimizu, 36, was charged with five counts of second-degree sexual assault and four counts of fourth-degree sexual assault, the Star Advertiser reported.
The victim, a Japanese exchange student, said Shimizu sexually assaulted him at least 10 times from October to February.
Shimizu, who is also Japanese, runs ESL Hawaii, a boarding home for Japanese students attending school in Honolulu.
The victim said he was first assaulted while he was bedridden with a head injury.
He was confined to his bed for a period of a few weeks, during which he was unable to go to the bathroom alone, prepare meals or change his own clothing, court documents show, the Star Advertiser reported.
The first assault occurred when Shimizu entered the victim’s room late one night in October.
The victim repeatedly asked her to stop and threatened to report her during the assault. Shimizu in turn threatened to accuse the boy of rape if he spoke out, court documents show, the Star Advertiser reported.
She also threatened to expel him from the school and the exchange program in which he was enrolled.
The last assault occurred in February when Shimizu, who was the boy’s guardian in Hawaii, used her own key to unlock the boy’s room, police said.
The victim’s attorney, Micky Yamatani, described the alleged assaults as “egregious.”
“He was an innocent resident of a so-called boarding house being run by this defendant who represented herself as the ‘boarding house mother’ who promised the victim a safe and healthy environment to study English and to experience the American schooling here in Hawaii,” Yamatani told the Star Advertiser.
« He has been greatly betrayed by this woman, injured by this woman, been traumatized by this experience, and he looks forward to the day where our American justice system would set forth the truth and punish the person who harmed, hurt, and injured him, » she said.
