With the Chinese billionaire Richard Liu at her Minneapolis area apartment, a 21-year-old University of Minnesota student sent a WeChat message to a friend in the middle of the night. She wrote that Liu had forced her to have sex with him.

"I was not willing," she wrote in Chinese on the messaging application around 2 a.m. on Aug. 31. "Tomorrow I will think of a way to escape," she wrote, as she begged the friend not to call police.

"He will suppress it," she wrote, referring to Liu. "You underestimate his power."