A Saudi Arabian man charged with brutally raping and beating his high-ranking diplomat wife claims he’s “traumatized” by life in Rikers Island.
Bandar Alharbi was arrested on Aug. 9, 2023 and charged with rape, assault, stalking and endangering the welfare of a child, and has been held without bail at Rikers awaiting trial since, records show.
Alharbi, 33, regularly abused his spouse, telling her “all the graphic ways that he would kill her, and all that she was good for was in the bedroom,” Assistant District Attorney Kirstie Raffan said during his August arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court.
Alharbi’s alleged abuse of his wife, an ambassador from Bahrain, started on their honeymoon in 2017, according to a transcript from his arraignment.
In 2018, he gave her the “first of many black eyes,” prosecutors contend.
In 2022, they moved to Manhattan so the wife could pursue a job at the United Nations.
In one incident that year, Alharbi allegedly headbutted the woman in front of their 4-year-old at their posh Hudson Yards apartment, Raffan said.
She went to the hospital for stitches and when she returned home, he allegedly beat her with a garbage can and forced her to have sex, Raffan continued.
Alharbi would appear “sexually aroused after these violent episodes,” the prosecutor said in the transcript.
The woman once complained to Alharbi that her head hurt after one of his attacks, she said.
“He came over to her, punched her on the other side of the head, and said, ‘This is to balance it out,’” Raffan said.
In April 2023, he threatened to send her family “a photograph of him slitting her throat,” Raffan said during the arraignment.
“Another man would’ve killed you by now,” he also told the 44-year-old, according to the transcript.
When their son was 5, he threw his hands up and pleaded with his father to stop hurting his mother, which the court papers said was the “last straw” for her.
She filed a police report and checked into a hotel, and Alharbi turned himself in a week and a half later.
His diplomatic immunity, which was granted when the family came to the US on diplomatic visas, was then withdrawn, according to the documents.
The wife has since fled to Bahrain with her son and filed for divorce.
Now Alharbi is asking a Manhattan Supreme Court judge to release him from Rikers while awaiting trial at the end of the month, citing “traumatizing” and “substandard” conditions at the lockup.
Alharbi says an inmate stabbed him through his cheek while he was sleeping in November, according to the petition.
Another time, raw sewage spewed into his cell and he was forced to mop it up with his own clothes, according to the documents.
“He was further forced to wait in literal filth until his entire area and laundry could be cleaned by janitorial staff,” his lawyers claimed.
Alharbi, who was an aircraft technician before moving to the US and was unemployed here, is seeking $250,000 bail, which his parents can help pay, and the Saudi government can loan.
In addition to his mechanical engineering background, Alharbi owns real estate in Saudi Arabia and a third of a nearly $2 million restaurant business, according to the filing.
His lawyers can then provide housing and help him find treatment for alleged alcoholism, the petition states.
His lawyers did not respond to questions.
A spokesman for the city Law Department said the complaint would be reviewed.
