Author Says Eric Schneiderman Called Her “Brown Slave” and Choked Her

A Sri Lankan woman is among those whose accusations of assault against former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman pressured him to resign.

Film producer and author Tanya Selvaratnam is one four woman who accused him of physical abuse in an article in the New Yorker.

“After I found out that other women had been abused by Attorney General Schneiderman in a similar manner many years before me,” Selvaratnam said in a statement released to Art-Net, “I wondered, who’s next, and knew something needed to be done. So I chose to come forward both to protect women who might enter into a relationship with him in the future but also to raise awareness around the issue of intimate partner violence.”

Selvaratnam shared intimate details of her relationship with Schneiderman.

“He was obsessed with having a threesome, and said it was my job to find a woman,” she said in the New Yorker. “He said he’d have nothing to look forward to if I didn’t, and would hit me until I agreed.”  She recalls, “Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did.  He started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that I was his property.”

She said Schneiderman often spat at her and choked her until she could barely breathe.  Selvaratnam called him a “misogynist and sexual sadist.”

Schneiderman resigned three hours after the article was published, but denied the allegations.

He said he was only engaged in “role playing and other consensual activity.” He said he only resigned because the accusations would “effectively prevent him from leading the office’s work at a critical time.”

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