The Soho nightclub in Sydney’s Kings Cross has come under fire after an inappropriate post to the venue’s official Facebook page. The post came just a week after the sentencing of owner Andrew Lazarus’ son Luke for the rape of an 18-year-old girl.

As Twitter user undressa pointed out on Friday, in a post advertising the club’s Easter drinks special, Soho used a photo depicting an apparently intoxicated young woman lying on the ground next to two drinks glasses, with her legs spread and gesturing a peace sign.

The post came a mere week after Luke Lazarus received a three-year minimum sentence for the sickening sexual assault of a young girl that he lured into the alley behind his father’s nightclub back in 2013.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported after his sentencing, after taking the young woman into the alleyway, Lazarus ignored her requests to return to her friends, removed her skirt and stockings, commanded her to get on the ground, and anally raped her.

In a sickening display of callousness, Lazarus then instructed the woman to enter her name into his phone under a list of ‘conquests’ and bragged to a friend that he “took a chick’s virginity” the morning after.

Despite the gruesome details of the crime, a string of prominent community figures, including Waverley mayor Sally Betts, the honorary secretary of the Honorary Consulate-General of Greece in Brisbane, came to Lazarus’ defence and vouched for his good character.

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Writing for Daily Life, Clementine Ford noted that the Soho club’s insensitive and utterly inappropriate Facebook post highlighted the indifference that the Lazarus family’s social circle have displayed towards the 23-year-old’s crime.

“It isn’t too far a leap to assume that the people handling Soho’s public relations were expressly thumbing their nose at the system which punished one of their own,” wrote Ford.

While Soho have since deleted the offending post, it hasn’t spared the club from a new raft of criticism on Twitter, with users calling the action “grotesque”, “offensive”, and “inappropriate”, while Ford noted on Twitter that the ad “shows just how little Soho nightclub cares about Luke Lazarus’ victim”.

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