First note that my source isn't a tabloid, this is Human Rights Watch. They check their sources.
> The woman in your one anecdotal point was charged with a seperate case of adultery during a rape trial that wasn't in conjunction with the rape.
From the article:
"The young woman, who is married, said she had met with a male acquaintance who had promised to give her back an old photograph of herself."
"Moreover, the court in October 2006 also sentenced both the woman and man who had been raped to 90 lashes each for what it termed “illegal mingling.”"
This is not adultery, this is just meeting a person of the other gender without her guardian.
> Furthermore the rapists were charged and punished for rape, an act that is illegal.
It is, indeed, illegal, but they were not charged for that: "Despite the prosecution’s requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The judges reportedly ignored evidence from a mobile phone video in which the attackers recorded the assault."
The scenario we are talking about is a husband repudiating his wife and abandoning her somewhere. Were she to be assaulted by a male, she would then be in an illegal "gender mingling" situation, often punished more harshly than rape. The only thing that is hyperbole in cup's scenario is that she would not be punished for adultery but just for breach of gender isolation.
Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but if you want to work on Saudi's system, that is all you have, the system is voluntarily opaque and does not communicate statistics on condemnations. Activists and journalists who may try to gather figures risk their freedom.
Women's life in Saudi Arabia is probably the most totalitarian experience available in 2017, on par with North Korea's experience.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/16/boxed/women-and-saudi-...