British backpacker pleads guilty to fatal e-scooter crash in Australia
Alicia Kemp, from Redditch, Worcestershire, appeared in Perth Magistrates' Court via video link from prison on Monday, charged with dangerous driving causing death under the influence of alcohol.
The 25-year-old was over the Australian legal limit when she crashed into Thanh Phan, 51, while riding through Perth's city centre on May 31.
Thanh Phan hit his head on the pavement and later died in hospital after suffering a brain bleed. Kemp and the scooter's passenger received minor injuries.
Another charge of causing harm to a passenger while under the influence of alcohol was dropped.
Investigators estimated she was driving at about the maximum speed of a rental e-scooter, 12 to 16 mph, when she crashed into Mr Phan, the court was told at an earlier hearing. Mike Tudori, Kemp's lawyer, told reporters outside the court that his client was 'nervous and worried" as 'a young foreign national girl' in an Australian jail.'She's obviously done something stupid at the time,' he said, according to Australian Associated Press.
'She obviously wasn't thinking, level-headed and there's consequences, and she just wants to get on with her life.'Mr Phan's death put the issue of e-scooter regulations into Australia's national spotlight, prompting the City of Perth and several other local councils to suspend hire services indefinitely.
Kemp will remain in custody and is due to appear before Perth District Court on October 31, when a date will be set for her sentencing.
In Australia the charge of dangerous driving causing death carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
Under Western Australian law, e-scooter riders must wear a helmet, be sober, carry no passengers and be over 16 years old.
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In 2019, it was revealed that Virginia Giuffre, who accused both Epstein and Prince Andrew of sexual abuse, had years earlier told her lawyers that she and two 'lovely girls' from New York once flew there with him some time after his presidency ended in January 2001. The late Giuffre, who alleged she was a teenage 'sex slave' for Epstein and his friends, said they all joined Epstein and Maxwell for a dinner at which Clinton teased the women with 'playful pokes' and 'brassy comments', adding 'there was no modesty between any of them' before leaving with the pair at the end of the night. In an unpublished memoir, she wrote: 'Strolling into the darkness with two beautiful girls around either arm, Bill seemed content to retire for the evening.' According to Giuffre, who never accused Clinton of any wrongdoing, when she asked Epstein what the ex-president was doing there, he laughed and answered cryptically: 'He owes me a favour.' Giuffre added: 'He never told me what favours they were. I never knew. I didn't know if he was serious.' Steve Scully, an IT contractor who worked for Epstein on the island, said he once saw Clinton with Epstein at his villa on the estate. Scully, a father of three girls, said there were photos of topless women everywhere on the island and he eventually left Epstein's employ because he became uncomfortable about the groups of young girls who appeared to be underage. And in 2020, Doug Band, Clinton's former key aide and confidant for 20 years, told Vanity Fair that Clinton visited '[expletive] Island' in January 2003 after he'd flown the previous year with Kevin Spacey and Epstein on the latter's capacious Boeing 727 (the plane nicknamed the Lolita Express) during a 'humanitarian' five-country trip to Africa for the Clinton Foundation. Band said Epstein gave him 'bad vibes' and he'd repeatedly advised his boss to have nothing to do with him, but to no avail. (In 2006 – the same year that Clinton accepted a $25,000 Epstein donation to his foundation – the latter was charged in Florida with 'procuring a minor for prostitution'.) A Clinton spokesman repeated the ex-president's insistence that he'd never visited the island and provided Vanity Fair with details of his movements at the time that clashed with Band's chronology.
