NEW YORK (AP) — A private equity executive turned his New York City apartment into a torture chamber of “grotesque sexual violence," Manhattan prosecutors said Thursday. He is accused of raping six women over five months in a depraved rampage in which he allegedly punched, waterboarded and shocked victims with a cattle prod and kept recordings of the assaults as trophies.
Ryan Hemphill, who remains jailed after his arrest last month, pleaded not guilty to a 116-count indictment charging him with predatory sexual assault and other crimes dating to last October. The 43-year-old, who is also a lawyer, threatened to have victims arrested or disappeared in a bid to keep them silent, prosecutors said.
“The defendant told these survivors that he was untouchable,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. “The indictment makes clear that he was wrong.”
Hemphill sat quietly in a khaki jail suit, his cuffed hands clutching a cross behind his back, as a prosecutor described his alleged crimes in gruesome detail.
If convicted, Hemphill could spend the rest of his life in prison. He was previously acquitted in 2015 of choking and holding a knife to his ex-girlfriend’s throat after testifying that he enjoyed strangling her during sex.
“We have reason to believe these six victims are only the tip of the iceberg,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mirah Curzer told Judge Ann E. Scherzer.
Hemphill’s apartment, near the Empire State Building, was outfitted with numerous surveillance cameras, and investigators have recovered images showing dozens, if not hundreds, of other women, many of them naked and blindfolded, Curzer said.
Investigators also found hundreds of bullets and high-capacity magazines, and a large amount of drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and fentanyl, prosecutors said.
Hemphill met the six women through websites, including some that specialize in “sugar daddy” arrangements for women seeking wealthy romantic partners, Curzer said.
He told the women he was into role play and dominance and offered them large sums of money in exchange for sex and companionship, though he ended up not paying some of the women or giving them fake cash instead, Curzer said.
As Hemphill got to know the women, he convinced them to confide their past sexual traumas, which he then deliberately reenacted as he assaulted them, Curzer said. He took advantage of some victims' inexperience, the prosecutor said, or crossed boundaries that victims had clearly articulated.
Hemphill is accused of tricking victims into ingesting substances that rendered them unable to fight back, using handcuffs and other restraints on them, wrapping their heads and faces with duct tape, slapping and punching them, and torturing them with a cattle prod and shock collar.
Hemphill kept one victim shackled to a bed for hours while she begged him to let her go, Curzer said.
Hemphill’s alleged conduct is “truly shocking to the conscience,” and he “has made clear that he has no regard for the law or the courts,” Curzer said.
To keep women quiet, Hemphill boasted about connections to law enforcement and organized crime, prosecutors said, and claimed that because the women had accepted offers of money, it was them who would be arrested.
Hemphill is charged with bribing a witness and, according to prosecutors, drew up a contract in which he agreed to pay a woman $2,000 in exchange for dropping a complaint she filed with police. He is also accused of forcing some victims to record videos in which they stated that they had consented to being abused.
“The power imbalance in his predatory acts could not be more clear,” Bragg told reporters. “He wielded his law degree and money as both sword and shield, coercing and silencing survivors.”
The arraignment happened down the hall from disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial.
Scherzer ordered Hemphill to remain jailed without bail after prosecutors raised concerns that his predicament, combined with his wealth and connections — including a history of philanthropy and family real estate holdings — could give him the means and incentive to flee the country.
Hemphill’s lawyer, a public defender assigned to represent him at least through his arraignment, had urged Scherzer to move him to a rehabilitation facility to deal with substance abuse issues.
Scherzer ruled that, given the fact pattern laid out by prosecutors, “including efforts to dissuade by force and threats to witnesses from testifying against him,” jailing him was the only way to ensure Hemphill would return to court.
Hemphill’s alleged behavior, the judge said, “shows his extent to which he’s willing to go to protect himself from facing these charges."
Ryan Hemphil is escorted from court in New York on Thursday, April 24, 2025, after his arraignment on sexual assault charges. (Curtis Means/Dailymail.com, Pool)
Ryan Hemphil appears in court in New York on Thursday, April 24, 2025, for his arraignment on sexual assault charges. (Curtis Means/Dailymail.com, Pool)
Ryan Hemphil appears in court in New York on Thursday, April 24, 2025, for his arraignment on sexual assault charges. (Curtis Means/Dailymail.com, Pool)
Ryan Hemphil is escorted to court in New York on Thursday, April 24, 2025, for his arraignment on sexual assault charges. (Curtis Means/Dailymail.com, Pool)
CANNES, France (AP) — Cannes is a short trip from Bono’s seaside villa in Eze-sur-Mer. He bought it with The Edge in 1993, and considers himself grateful to a coastline that, he says, gave him a “delayed adolescence.”
“I can tell you I’ve slept on beaches close to here,” Bono says with a grin. “I’ve woken up in the sun.”
But that doesn't mean the Cannes Film Festival is a particularly familiar experience for the U2 frontman. He’s here to premiere the Apple TV+ documentary “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” which captures his one-man stage show. Before coming, Bono’s daughter, the actor Eve Hewson, gave him some advice.
“She said: ‘Just get over yourself and bring it,’" Bono said in an interview on a hotel off the Croisette. "What do I have to bring? Bring yourself and your gratitude that you’re a musician and they’re allowing you into a festival that celebrates actors and storytellers of a different kind. I said, ‘OK, I’ll try to bring it.’”
Besides, Cannes, he notes, was founded amid World War II as an alternative to then-Mussolini controlled Venice Film Festival. It was, he says, “designed to find fascists.”
Shifts in geopolitical tectonics was much on Bono's mind. He has spent much of his activist life fighting for aid to Africa and combating HIV-AIDS. U.S. President Donald Trump's dismantling of USAID has reversed much of that.
“What’s irrational is taking pleasure in the defacement of these institutions of mercy,” Bono said.
“Bono: Stories of Surrender,” an Andrew Dominik-directed black-and-white film that begins streaming May 30, adapts the one-man stage show that, in turn, came from Bono's 2022 book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.”
In the film, Bono is self-effacing and reflective, sifting through the formative influence of his father, U2's skyrocketing to fame and considering how ego and social work might be related. He calls it “the tall tales of a short rock star.” And as was the case on a recent sunny afternoon in Cannes, Bono makes a captivating raconteur.
Remarks have been lightly edited for clarity.
BONO: Well, that’s right. Globalization did very well for the world’s poor. That and increased aid levels brought a billion people out of extreme poverty and halved childhood mortality — remarkable jumps for quality of life for human beings.
But it’s also fair to say certain communities really paid the price for that — here in Europe, in the United States. And I’m not sure those communities were credited enough for weathering storms that globalization brought. So I understand how we got to this place, but it doesn’t mean that it’s the right place to be in.
Nationalism is not what we need. We grew up in a very charged atmosphere in Ireland. It makes you suspicious of nationalism and those animal spirits that can be drummed up. This is me speaking about surrender, “Stories of Surrender,” at a time when the world has never been closer to a world war in my lifetime. At first I think it looks absurd, a bit ridiculous — now that has never stopped me in the past — but I think it’s OK to look ridiculous for these ideas. Like surrender, nonviolence, peace.
BONO: The new pope, he does look like a pope. That’s a good start. I just saw the other day his first piece and he was talking about stopping shouting, God might prefer whispers. I thought, “Oh, this could be interesting.” I’m more of a shouter myself. I come from punk rock. But I’m learning to turn that shout into a whisper in this film to get to an intimacy.
BONO: Well, the accuracy of the put-down — “You are a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor” — is so all encompassing. I was going to call the play “The Baritone Who Thinks He’s a Tenor.” He’s on my mind because he’s the reason I sing.
It’s a wound that will never close because after playing him on stage for all those nights — just by turning left or right — I always loved him but I started to really like him. He started to make me laugh. There was a gift, as well as the voice, that he left me. Would he forgive me for impersonating him in the Teatro di San Carlo, a sacred place for tenors, probably not. But here I am impersonating an actor, so.
BONO: Mission creep. I knew I had to write the book. The play was so I didn’t have to tour the book in normal promotional activity, that I could actually have fun with it and play all the different characters in my life. I thought it was really good fun. Then I realized: Oh, there’s parts of you that people don’t know about. We don’t go to U2 shows for belly laughs. But that’s a part of who I am, which is the mischief as well as the melancholy.
Then you end up doing a play with a lot of cameras in the way. Enter Andrew Dominik and he taught me something that I didn’t really understand but my daughter does: The camera really knows when you’re lying. So if want to tell this story, you better get ready to take your armor off. You’re going to feel naked in front of the whole school, but that’s what it takes.
BONO: Based on my behavior just in the past week, the answer to that question is probably: Must try harder. The pilgrim’s lack of progress. I would say that I understand a little better where I came from and that where I end up depends on how I deal with that.
I’ve been calling it the hall of mirrors, when you try to figure out who you are and who’s behind the face. Then you just see all these faces staring back at you, and they’re all true. The real star of this movie is my dad. I sort of like him better than I like myself because humor has become so important to me. It’s not like everything needs to be a belly laugh, but there’s a freedom. People like me, we can sing about freedom. It’s much better to be it.
BONO: There’s a minister from Albania who said something that really stuck with me. She said: If you have a chance to hope, it’s a moral duty because most people don’t. So, yes, I feel we’ll figure our way out of this. This is a scary moment.
I think acknowledging that we can lose all we’ve gained is sobering but it may be course-changing. I just believe in people enough. I believe in Americans enough. I’m an Irish person, I can’t tell people how to vote.
I can tell you that a million children dying because their life support systems were pulled out of the wall, with glee, that’s not the America that I recognize or understand. You’re on the front lines of Europe here. America came in and saved the day. Ironically, so did Russia. More people died from Russia fighting the Nazis than everybody else. Now they tread on their own sacred memories by treading on the Ukrainians who also died on the front lines. I think part of that is that history didn’t acknowledge it.
I believe there is integrity in the Russian people. They need to change their leader, in my view. I believe there is integrity in the Americans. They will figure it out. Who was it who said: If you give Americans the facts, they will eventually make the right choice. Right now, they’re not getting the facts. Think of it: a 70% decline in HIV-AIDS, Republican-led, Democratically followed though. The greatest health intervention in the history of medicine to fight HIV-AIDS has been thrown away. It was nearly there. To a space traveler, it’s like getting to Mars and going, “Nah, we’ll go back.” It’s bewildering to me.
For more coverage of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, visit https://apnews.com/hub/cannes-film-festival.
The Edge, from second left, Bono and Sean Penn pose with military personnel for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Bono: Stories of Surrender' at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
The Edge, left, and Bono pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Bono: Stories of Surrender' at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP)
Erik Messerschmid, from left, Bono, Kelly McNamara, and Jon Kamen pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Bono: Stories of Surrender' at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Bono poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Bono: Stories of Surrender' at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Bono poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Bono: Stories of Surrender' at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Lewis Joly/Invision/AP)
