Russian political artist Pyotr Pavlensky has told Ukrainian media that he and his partner fled Russia because prosecutors had filed charges of sexual assault against them – charges he says are fabricated.
Pavlensky told Ukraine’s Hromadske online broadcaster that he and his partner Oksana Shalygina had been accused of sexual assault by Anastasia Slonina, an actress with the Russian opposition theatre, Teatr.Doc.
Pavlensky said that Russian law allows police to arrest the suspects in sexual assault cases without evidence. If found guilty, the couple could face up to 10 years in prison.
Both Pavlensky and Shalygina denied the charges, and called them “an attempt to liquidate (Pavlensky) from Russia.”
The Kyiv Post couldn’t immediately reach Slonina. Hromadske said that they had contacted Solonina, but she hang up the phone after they asked her about the allegations.
The producer and scriptwriter of Teatr.Doc Vladimir Lisovskyi told the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta on Nov. 16 that Pavlensky and Shalygina tried to rape Solonina in December and cut her hands, but that her injuries hadn’t been serious.
Pavlensky first became famous after a performance on Red Square in Moscow, during which he sat naked and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones as a metaphor for Russian society’s political apathy. Pavlenky said that the authorities had threatened him since then.
In 2015 and 2016 Pavlensky spent seven month in prison for setting fire to the door of the headquarters of Russia’s FSB security service. On June 8, Pavlensky was found guilty and released.
Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky poses after setting fire to the doors of the headquarters of the FSB security service, the successor to the KGB, in central Moscow early on Nov. 9, 2015. (AFP)
Pavlensky said that he had met Slonina in September. The woman had once come to the couple’s apartment, “but there wasn’t anything like assault.” Pavlensky said he later found out that Slonina had told the police she had been assaulted on that day.
Pavlensky and Shalygina said that they were in Poland when Slonina passed a message through a mutual friend that the couple shouldn’t return to Russia. After the couple ignored the warning and came back to Russia, they were detained at the airport by police. Pavlensky said that they were questioned by officials from the Russian Investigation Committee for about eight hours, but that investigators had released them on the condition that they not leave the country.
However, on Jan. 15 the couple left Russia and came to Ukraine, and then took a flight to Paris. Pavlensky said that Slonina was probably working with authorities to get him out of the country. He said that he would ask for political asylum in France if Russia officially presses charges.
“They (the authorities) have shown us two ways how we will be liquidated from the political context: we face regime camps, or we leave the territory of Russia,” Pavlensky said.
He said that the couple decided to leave the country because their children would be sent to orphanages if their parents were found guilty.
“I refuse to be imprisoned for something I haven’t done, and obediently go to the slaughter like a sheep. Moreover, (I refuse to) drag behind me my dearest ones, and deprive them of freedom.”
