A new sexual assault accusation, the seventh, against former president Óscar Arias was published by the New York Times on Sunday.

According to the publication, "Carina A. Black, 52, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the New York Times that Mr. Arias tried to grope and kiss her in 1998, when he visited the university as speaker."

This is an excerpt from the report "The Hurdles Women Faced in Accusing to Nobel Laureate of Sexual Misconduct."

As she took Mr. Arias around to meetings and events, Ms. Black said, she found herself alone in an elevator with him. He pushed her against the wall, put his hand across her chest and tried to kiss her, she said.

"I pushed him, and I smacked him in the face," she said.

But because she was not injured, it never occurred to her to file a report, Ms. Black said. She has decided to tell her story, she said, in part so people will believe his first accuser.

"Arias is so powerful," she said. "He has huge land ownership. He is so revered. In Latin America, the power is so tilted on the side of men. This behavior is what most women have grown up with. "

The full article on New York Times can be reached here “The Hurdles Women Faced in Accusing a Nobel Laureate of Sexual Misconduct”*

Mr. Arias won the country's presidency from 1986 to 1990. His role in the negotiation of a peace agreement to stop the Central American Wars earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987. In 2006 he won re-election as Costa Rican president from 2006 to 2010.

As A.M. Costa Rica has reported, the Deputy Prosecutor for Gender registered two criminal complaints against former president Óscar Arias Sánchez for alleged sexual assault. One complaint was made by a woman surnamed Arce and the other by a woman surnamed Morales.  Those accusations were registered as file #19000098994-PE in the Prosecutor's Office and are subject to investigation.

The first formal complaint was made on Monday of last week by a woman surnamed Arce.  As reported in A.M. Costa Rica, this complaint was published by Semanario Universidad. The woman filed a sexual assault accusation against Mr. Arias at the Public Prosecutor's Office.

According to Arce’s testimony, " he grabbed me from behind and touched my breasts. I told him no and that he was married, that was my no. I did not know what I really did, and I thought that was the only line of defense, because I had this fear, if I refused he would not cooperate with us anymore. He kept touching me, he has put his fingers in my vagina and he touched me and kissed me. And then he told me to wait a moment and left the office. I was like I did not know what to do, I felt trapped at that moment."

The second official complaint was made on Thursday of the last week, by a woman surnamed Morales at the office of the Deputy Prosecutor for Gender.

Ms. Morales published an article entitled "My bad experience with Óscar Arias" in the magazine Profile (Perfil). In the article, she explained that in 2013 she "had an interview with Arias about the arms trade treaty at his house. When at the end of the interview he sat at his desk to look for some photos on his computer. He said to me (with a gesture) that I would sit on his leg so we could see the screen. I remember that I mentioned that:  if his wife was not going to get angry? His wife was on the cover of our magazine in February of that year, I told him that I had interviewed her and that she was an admirable lady. The situation did not go further. There was no sexual assault, luckily," said Ms. Morales.

Other women made accusations of similar behavior but did not file complaints at the Prosecutors office. Instead, they went public in newspapers.

One was journalist Emma Daly, who works for the Human Rights Watch organization and who made public accusations in an interview in the Washington Post. According to Ms. Daly, Mr. Arias groped her in 1990 when she was a reporter covering Central America issues, and Mr. Arias was also at the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, Nicaragua. Ms. Daly said she asked a question and instead of answering the question, Mr. Arias put his hand between her breasts and exclaimed, "You're not wearing a bra." Ms. Daly said that she responded, "Yes, I am."

Another was Ana Eleonora Antillón who, in an interview covered by local newspaper La Nacion, said that when she was 25 years old, she was working as a press adviser for Arias in the electoral campaign of the National Liberation Party before the 1986 elections.