![]() In a 2022 deposition before German lawyers, Van Rider said she was paid by an intermediary on behalf of al Saud to circumvent the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Official documents accessed by Forbidden Stories and its partners reveal the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened an investigation into Van Rider’s activities, aiming to uncover who funded her and whether she violated US law. Van Rider had met with Sattam bin Khalid al Saud, a Saudi prince, in Dubai in April 2019, and subsequently attacked Oueiss online as part of a small group of female Trump supporters. ![]() Van Rider, it turned out, was paid for her pro-Saudi tweets, according to an investigation by Die Zeit. “It was weird that an American citizen, who does not speak Arabic…who does not know me… tweets about me day and night,” Oueiss told Forbidden Stories. Van Rider was relentless in her online attacks, calling Oueiss “a liar,” claiming she had “sold to terrorists to get a story” and worked for “a network airing antisemitism.” She also publicly praised Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The target of this campaign? Veteran Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss, whose prime-time show features sharp, incisive interviews with established Middle East commentators. Thousands of Saudi-affiliated users directed misogynistic insults at the woman. The leaked picture, obtained through a phone hack and in some cases deceptively manipulated to make the woman appear nude, had gone viral. On June 9, 2020, Florida resident Sharon Van Rider retweeted a picture of a woman in a hot tub.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |