I'm embedding the video below the fold. Here's a link to the story.
Muammar Qaddafi had a son named Hannibal.
Hannibal Qaddafi had a beachfront villa.
Hannibal Qaddafi had a wife named Aline in the beachfront villa.
Hannibal and Aline Qaddafi had a daughter in the beachfront villa.
Hannibal and Aline Qaddafi had a nanny for the daughter in the beachfront villa.
Hannibal and Aline Qaddafi's nanny for the daughter could not leave.
Hannibal and Aline Qaddafi's nanny for the daughter could not get paid.
Hannibal and Aline Qaddafi's nanny for the daughter was in effect a slave.
One day, Aline Qaddafi ordered the nanny to beat the daughter to make her stop crying.
The nanny, an Ethiopian woman named Mullah, refused to beat the daughter.
The video shows what happened as a result. I warn you, it is graphic and disgusting. If you don't want to ruin your day, you may want to stick to the story instead.
As we were about to leave [from filming in Hannibal's beautiful villa], one of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she'd been burnt by Hannibal's wife, Aline.
I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.
At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.
I can't quote the rest here because of fair use restrictions. At the end is this:
"I worked a whole year they didn't give me one penny," Mullah said. "Now I want to go to the hospital. I have no money. I have nothing."
One thing that is clear from the story is that while there were villains in that villa there were also heroes. Mullah the nanny. The guard who tried to take her to the hospital. Even, in a small way, the man who interrupted a CNN frothy feature story on people breaking out bottles of Cristal without realizing how expensive it is and saying, in effect, "you idiots, that is not the story."
"This is the story."
I am proud, relieved, grateful that Libya has been liberated.
Now someone had better get Shweyga Mullah to a goddamned hospital, stat.
1:27 PM PT: h/t to pico for letting us know about the #nannyinneed twitter feed, through which people say that they are trying to arrange help. Caveat donor, of course -- but at present this appears to be the sole organized effort afoot. (Update to update: the feed is being organized by Dan Rivers (CNN) himself.)
3:04 PM PT: This is off topic, but for people who worry that the site is going downhill and all that -- please check out the top two diaries on the Rec List right now -- Pericles's respectful complaint about Administration messaging and Hamden Rice's explanation to those who need one of the real significance of Martin Luther King Jr's actions. Despite their provocative titles, they are examples of DKos at its best. If you recommended this post, I hope you'll read those as well.
Tue Aug 30, 2011 at 8:55 AM PT: h/t Laurence: CNN's Dan Rivers reports that Shweyga Mullah is now receiving treatment in Tripoli.