Strauss-Kahn accuser to file civil suit "soon" (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A lawyer for the hotel maid who accused former International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her in a New York hotel said on Thursday he planned to file a civil lawsuit soon.

Kenneth Thompson, the lawyer for Nafissatou Diallo, did not specify to reporters at a press conference exactly when a civil lawsuit against Strauss-Kahn would be filed.

"I said soon. Soon is soon," he told reporters.

Diallo made an emotional public appeal at a highly unusual press conference for people to believe her story. The criminal case has teetered for weeks since prosecutors disclosed they had uncovered several discrepancies in Diallo's account of her past.

Diallo told reporters she cannot stop crying and that she wants no other woman to suffer like her, first at the hands of a powerful attacker and then by having her story questioned.

"I am going through a lot. My daughter, we are going through a lot. We are crying everyday. We can't sleep," an emotional and tearful Diallo said.

"A lot of things they say about me are not true," the woman, called "Nafi" by her friends, said.

The 62-year-old Strauss-Kahn faces criminal charges including attempted rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse.

Strauss-Kahn, who was expected to be a contender to be the next French president, denies the charges and contends any sex that afternoon with Diallo was consensual.

His lawyers have labeled the Diallo's effort to speak out as a last-ditch effort by her and her lawyers to extract money from the former IMF chief.

View the original article here

Going public: Strauss-Kahn accuser tries rare path (AP)

NEW YORK – The hotel housekeeper accusing Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her is telling her story publicly, she says, because she wants the former International Monetary Fund leader behind bars. But it's hard to say whether her striking move will help or hobble her goal.

Nafissatou Diallo's decision to speak out in media interviews is an unusual and risky move for an accuser at this point in a criminal case, legal experts said.

It gives her an empowering chance to tell her side of the story as prosecutors weigh whether to press ahead with the case amid their concerns about her credibility. But it also enshrines a version of events that defense lawyers could mine for discrepancies with her grand jury testimony or use as fodder to argue she was seeking money or public attention.

Whatever the outcome, "it's an extraordinary turn of events, I would say, for her to go on a kind of lobbying, public relations campaign to get this case tried," said Pace Law School professor and former prosecutor Bennett L. Gershman.

After staying silent for nearly two months about an alleged attack that Strauss-Kahn vehemently denies, Diallo gave her account to Newsweek and ABC News.

Adding details and her own voice to the basics authorities have given, Diallo said the former IMF leader grabbed and attacked her "like a crazy man" in his $3,000-a-night Manhattan hotel suite on May 14 as she implored him to stop and feared for her job.

"I push him. I get up. I wanted to scare him. I said, `Look, there is my supervisor right there,'" she told Newsweek in an interview in her lawyer's office. But Strauss-Kahn said no one was there to hear, she said, and he went on to yank up her uniform dress, tear down her pantyhose, forcefully grab her crotch and then grip her head and force her to perform oral sex.

Strauss-Kahn's lawyers on Monday called the interviews "a desperate distraction from the key fact that Ms. Diallo has had to admit to misleading" prosecutors.

The interviews come with the case against Strauss-Kahn in limbo after Manhattan prosecutors raised doubts about the housekeeper's overall credibility. They said on July 1 that she had lied about her life story and gave inconsistent descriptions about what she did right after the alleged attack.

The disclosures prompted her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, to criticize the district attorney, press prosecutors to keep going with the case and even call for a special prosecutor to take over.

Diallo told her interviewers she wants Strauss-Kahn held accountable, and she was going public to tell a story she said had never wavered, to counter misleading portrayals of her and to address doubts about her trustworthiness.

"I want him to go to jail. I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money," she told Newsweek.

Diallo told ABC she didn't know Strauss-Kahn was a high-profile French politician until later.

"I was watching the news and they said he's going to be the next president of France," she said. "I said, `Oh, my God.' I was crying. `They're going to kill me. I'm going to die.'"

Before Sunday, the 32-year-old Guinean immigrant's name had been reported by some French media outlets but not by major U.S. media, which generally protect the identities of people who say they've been sexually assaulted.

"I never want to be in public, but I have no choice," she said, according to ABC News. "God is my witness I'm telling the truth."

But against the backdrop of uncertainty about her believability and motives, the interviews may raise as many questions as they answer, legal observers said.

"On the one hand, there's an upside that perhaps it will encourage the prosecutors to move forward with their case. On the other hand, there's the risk that whatever she says can be used against her in a civil or criminal case, especially with respect to any inconsistencies," said Sanford Rubenstein, a New York lawyer who has represented victims in noted cases — and advised them not to give interviews while the case was ongoing, he said. His clients have included Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was tortured in a New York City police station bathroom in 1997.

Prosecutors generally discourage potential witnesses in criminal cases from speaking outside court while a case is pending, partly to avoid creating multiple accounts that could diverge, even slightly. In a trial, such gaps can become thin edges of a wedge for adversaries to drive doubts about an accuser's veracity into jurors' minds.

"The more that's out there, the more you're susceptible on cross-examination," said Elizabeth Crotty, a defense lawyer and former Manhattan assistant district attorney.

The housekeeper's interviews also could provide an avenue for Strauss-Kahn's lawyers to suggest she was out for publicity or cash, a notion that already has shadowed the case. A day after Strauss-Kahn's arrest, she was recorded alluding to his wealth on a phone call with an incarcerated friend, a law enforcement official has said.

Newsweek said she had not ruled out trying to make some money from her situation, a suggestion that a civil lawsuit could be forthcoming, though she told the magazine, "I don't think about money."

The interviews nonetheless could tempt prosecutors to bow out rather than go forward with the case because "she's already trying it in the court of public opinion," Gershman said.

The DA's office has said its investigation, not external factors, will determine the outcome. Communications chief Erin Duggan said Sunday the investigation was continuing and declined to discuss the case further.

In the interviews, Diallo addresses some of the inconsistencies that already have rocked the case.

She testified to a grand jury that after the alleged attack, she cowered in a hallway and watched Strauss-Kahn leave, then told a supervisor. Prosecutors said earlier this month that she later told them she actually had gone on cleaning rooms before consulting her boss. Diallo told Newsweek she was disoriented and went into the rooms briefly before a supervisor appeared and asked why she was upset, but the maid denied changing her account.

Diallo also lied about her background, including by telling prosecutors an emotional story of being gang-raped in her homeland, they said. She told Newsweek she was raped by two soldiers but acknowledged she had embellished her life story on her 2003 asylum application; prosecutors have said she told them she repeated the lies to them to be consistent.

Strauss-Kahn lawyers Benjamin Brafman and William W. Taylor III rapped Diallo for conducting what they portrayed as a media campaign to pressure prosecutors to pursue Strauss-Kahn as she perhaps plans to sue him. They have said whatever happened in the suite wasn't forced, and they are pressing for the case to be dismissed.

"Nothing can camouflage the lies and misstatements that Ms. Diallo has consistently put forward against an innocent person to law enforcement, friends, medical professionals and members of the media," they said in a statement Monday.

Thompson fired off a statement of his own Sunday, saying Strauss-Kahn's lawyers "have conducted an unprecedented smear campaign against the victim of a violent sexual attack."

The American Bar Association's professional conduct rules tell lawyers not to make public statements out of court that are likely to prejudice the case. But the rules don't apply to their clients and in a heavily covered case like Strauss-Kahn's, it's questionable how much any lawyer's remark "will affect the jury when there's so much publicity already out there," said Ellen Yaroshevsky, a legal ethicist at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

___

Jennifer Peltz can be reached at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

View the original article here

Strauss-Kahn's accuser: Schemer or immigrant survivor? (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – First she was portrayed as a model of virtue who was violated by a rich and powerful man.

Then she was presented as a liar, a schemer associated with criminals in the New York underworld, who may have taken down the next president of France for her own financial gain.

The world remains divided on the hotel maid who accused former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of assaulting her in a New York hotel on May 14, an explosive case which like many sex cases comes down to whose account of the incident you believe.

Nafissatou Diallo, whose story had been told through prosecutors and defense lawyers, gave her own account to the media this weekend in a graphic interview with Newsweek and ABC, saying Strauss-Kahn behaved like a "crazy man."

It was the first time the widow with a teenage daughter, an immigrant from Guinea in West Africa, had spoken publicly since she alleged Strauss-Kahn emerged naked from the bathroom of his luxury suite and forced her to perform oral sex.

Defense lawyers insist any sex was consensual and called the interview an effort to extract money from Strauss-Kahn.

Diallo's lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, said she wanted people to know she is not a "shakedown artist or a prostitute." The illiterate daughter of a Muslim imam, she was working as a cleaner at the luxury Manhattan hotel.

"She is not a whore, she is a good mother," said Blake Diallo, the Senegalese manager of a Harlem restaurant she once frequented, who is not related to her. "She was a wonderful, caring, hard-working African woman."

To women's rights advocates she is a survivor who embodies the immigrant story of fleeing poverty and repression for a better life in America. They also lament how the accuser so easily becomes the accused.

Yet defenders and political supporters of Strauss-Kahn were also handed material they could eagerly latch on to.

Prosecutors hoping to jail Strauss-Kahn for up to 25 years were forced to report troubling information about Diallo's background. In order to win U.S. asylum she had lied about being gang-raped and she changed details of her story about what happened minutes after her encounter with Strauss-Kahn.

What's more, the woman appeared to be surrounded by shady characters. The revelations threw the case into disarray, providing Strauss-Kahn's defense lawyers with ammunition to undermine her credibility should the case ever reach trial.

SHATTERED HOMELAND

According to lawyers for the accuser, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney's office said they had found a recorded telephone conversation after the incident between her and a man detained in an Arizona jail in which she said "words to the effect" that "this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing."

The precise context of the conversation has been clouded by the difficulties of interpretation of a dialect of Fulani, but they were seen as seriously undermining the prosecution case.

Despite speculation that he might drop the charges, New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance has yet to do so, indicating prosecutors may believe parts of both narratives -- that she was a victim but she also has inconvenient facts in her background.

"Poor immigrants of violence often do things to survive ... and are sometimes drawn into criminal or unsavory activity and often end up with really poor quality immigration assistance," said Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the battered women's services group that has provided services to the accuser.

"She's typical of so many of the very vulnerable immigrant women in our city."

Despite Guinea's ample natural resources, decades of misrule mean its 10 million residents mostly make do on average incomes of around $3 a day.

One of six brothers and sisters, Diallo's early life was one of limited horizons and expectations. Her home village in the remote Labe region, a hard day's drive north of Conakry, still has no water, electricity or phone lines. It is reached only after a 30-minute scramble on foot through thick forest.

Her family is of Fula ethnicity, like 40 percent of the population. Her late father was known as a devoted and learned Muslim. Like many West Africans, her family practiced the Tidjiane version of Sunni Islam.

"Here, the girls get married at 16 and the boys at 20. We don't know anything about that other way of life," her older brother Mamoudou told Reuters, referring to the Western lifestyle his sister found in New York.

Her own arranged marriage to a distant cousin ended with the death of her husband -- the cause is unclear -- after which she left her home village in the mid-1990s, traveling to the capital to become a seamstress. Her ties with her family back in the Labe region then appeared to weaken.

Later, in her asylum application, prosecutors said she fabricated and embellished her story, claiming she and her husband were persecuted and harassed by the Guinean regime and her husband was jailed, tortured, deprived of medical treatment and eventually died as a result.

After the encounter with Strauss-Kahn, she told prosecutors she had fabricated the statement with the help of an advisor. Kenneth Thompson, a lawyer representing her, said she volunteered to prosecutors she had lied on her asylum application due to that bad advice.

FROM AFRICA TO THE BRONX

Diallo was a victim of genital mutilation, and she wanted to avoid the same fate for her daughter, Thompson said. Those facts would have been enough to win asylum without the need to invent a story, he said.

"We've seen ... clients are encouraged to make misrepresentations, even when the true story might be the very strong basis for an immigration claim," Leidholdt said.

Prosecutors said Diallo was the victim of a rape in Guinea, though not a gang-rape as related in her asylum application.

Within days of Strauss-Kahn's arrest, his advisers worked to collect information about Diallo's history.

They quickly turned up links with people involved in criminal activities. The man she spoke with in the Arizona jail, for example, had been arrested for bartering counterfeit designer clothes for marijuana, the New York Times reported.

In addition, investigators found bank records showing deposits of thousands of dollars into her bank account, transferred there from a variety of U.S. states by the jailed man, the Times said. Diallo told Newsweek magazine he did indeed transfer the money into her account, but she was never told about it and she never spent any of the cash.

Once she moved to New York, she became a regular at Cafe 2115 on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, a magnet for the many French-speaking West Africans who live in Harlem, the largely black section of upper Manhattan.

"These stories of drugs and laundering money, I don't know her that way. She is not that kind of person," the restaurateur Diallo said.

She worked at the African American Restaurant Marayway, a Gambian eatery in the Bronx, where she worked serving Gambian food before landing a job at the luxury Sofitel hotel.

Immigrant opinions of the woman are sharply mixed.

"Why would a big man who could be president of France want to spoil his chances by doing such a thing?" asked Ouma Mahamadou, 23, a Nigerian patron of Cafe 2115. "It doesn't make any sense to me, so she must be lying."

(Additional reporting by Paula Rogo, Noeleen Walder and Mark Hosenball in New York and Saliou Samb in Conakry, editing by Mark Egan and Todd Eastham)

View the original article here

U.S. news media debate naming Strauss-Kahn accuser (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – By now, anyone following the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case knows plenty about the woman who accused him: her age, origins, work history, relatives and, most recently, a series of lies and misstatements she gave to investigators.

But one detail has remained concealed by major U.S. media: her name.

Citing the unique stigma of rape, American news outlets have for decades refused to identify victims and alleged victims of sexual assault, even as they investigate their backgrounds.

As recent revelations raise doubts about the credibility of Strauss-Kahn's accuser, and the attempted rape case against the former International Monetary Fund chief appears close to collapse, news organizations have begun to revisit these long-held policies.

"It's an ethical minefield," said Adam Penenberg, a journalism professor at New York University. "It puts everybody in an impossible position."

The woman's name has already been published by numerous news outlets in Europe and Africa, where accusers' names are more routinely reported.

An Internet search will reveal it is on hundreds of websites. Some journalism experts say that renders the convention of anonymity increasingly meaningless.

No major U.S. news organization has yet revealed the woman's name, even as her credibility has been seriously questioned.

"Editors here have discussed the situation as new developments have emerged in this case," said Phil Corbett, the New York Times' associate managing editor for standards.

"As of now, the authorities continue to consider the woman to be the victim in an alleged sexual assault, and we have stuck to our normal practice of not identifying her."

Editors at Reuters debated the issue and decided the woman should remain unidentified, said Jim Gaines, the global head of ethics, standards and innovation.

"It was very brief, because we all know what the rule is," Gaines said. "It's hard to anticipate the circumstances under which we would name her, unless she named herself."

WHEN SHOULD POLICY CHANGE?

Are there circumstances that would justify dropping the policy and identifying the woman?

Several editors said a dismissal of the charges against Strauss-Kahn would probably be insufficient to convince them to use his accuser's name, unless, for example, authorities seek to charge her with perjury for suspicion of lying under oath.

"I would distinguish between charges being dropped and charges being brought against her," said Roger Smith, the national editor for the Los Angeles Times.

Corbett said there is no "clear, bright line" that would indicate when to use her name.

Journalists are not legally bound to conceal the identities of sexual assault victims -- the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that news outlets may use them if legally obtained. But with rare exceptions, the media have refrained from doing that.

One exception was NBC News' decision in 1991 to identify the woman who accused a Kennedy family member, William Kennedy Smith, of raping her. That sparked a national conversation about privacy and the media's responsibility to rape victims.

The prevailing view, then as now, is that sexual assault is uniquely damaging and worthy of an exception.

"The reality is that as journalists, we have a special responsibility to help ensure that women feel safe reporting sexual assault. It's not like other crimes," said Bruce Shapiro, head of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University in New York.

FEAR OF SACRIFICING PRIVACY

Some experts say there is also a societal obligation to encourage victims to come forward without fear of sacrificing their privacy.

"What about the next woman, and the one after that?" said Alisa Solomon, a journalism professor at Columbia.

A handful of journalists assert the practice of withholding victims' names runs counter to journalism's goal of providing a complete and truthful account.

One dissenter is Geneva Overholser, who as editor of the Des Moines Register won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series about a woman's ordeal as a rape victim.

"We're setting ourselves up to do something that feels very much like social work, not journalism, and that's not our role," said Overholser, now the director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

To Overholser, the debate in the Strauss-Kahn case only underscores the problem with concealing the name in the first place. By splashing his name and photo across front pages while withholding hers, she said, there is an implicit judgment that one side is wrong and the other is right.

"If anything, it helps continue the stigma," she said. "We're signaling to rape victims that they have to go and sit in a dark corner."

(Reporting by Joseph Ax, editing by Jesse Wegman and Grant McCool)

View the original article here

Accuser seeks special prosecutor for Strauss-Kahn (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Lawyers representing the woman who accused former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault have asked the leading New York prosecutor to withdraw from the case and appoint a special prosecutor.

In a letter to District Attorney Cyrus Vance, the lawyers accused a prosecutor in Vance's office of leaking damaging information about Strauss-Kahn's accuser.

A spokeswoman for Vance had no immediate comment.

"District Attorney Vance, we ask in earnest that your office voluntarily recuse itself from the Strauss-Kahn case and that you appoint a special prosecutor," Kenneth Thompson, the lawyer for the 32-year-old hotel maid from Guinea, wrote in a letter dated Wednesday.

Recusals are rare and this one was not likely to succeed, legal experts said.

Reuters obtained a copy of the letter after defense lawyers for Strauss-Kahn met with prosecutors from Vance's office for nearly two hours on Wednesday as the case against him appeared in serious jeopardy.

Both sides declined to give any details of the meeting. The New York Times had reported they would discuss whether the charges could be resolved by a dismissal or plea agreement.

The case was thrown into jeopardy last week when prosecutors discovered the accuser had lied about being gang-raped in her home country in her application for U.S. asylum and changed details of her story about what she did after her encounter with Strauss-Kahn in a luxury suite.

Thompson has said the woman had made mistakes in the past but insisted she was sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn, and that evidence existed to prove it.

'DAMAGING LEAKS'

Thompson accused Vance's chief assistant, Daniel Alonso, of planting "damaging leaks" in the media that undermined his client's character and the charges against Strauss-Kahn.

He faulted prosecutors for never handing over to him an audio recording of a telephone call his client made to her boyfriend in an Arizona prison while leaking a description of part of the call to The New York Times.

Thompson referred to a specific quote in which an unnamed law enforcement official spoke to the Times about that phone conversation.

"She says words to the effect of, 'Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing,'" the Times reported.

Thompson said Alonso used "virtually the same words" in relating the call to him hours before it appeared in the Times.

The letter also complained about the office refusing to fully deny a story by the New York Post that his client may be a prostitute. Thompson filed a libel suit against the Post about that.

"Such apparent leaks by members of your office is, without question, an abrogation of the duties and responsibilities of a prosecutor," the letter said.

The letter also complained about one of the prosecutors having "screamed at and disrespected the victim while she met with them."

Law experts say the request was unlikely to succeed.

"It's a silly request," said Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman, who said he believes Thompson's letter has more to do with public relations than with a legitimate demand. "It makes for a nice sound bite."

Recusals are rare and usually occur when there is a personal stake in the outcome for members of the prosecutor's office.

"Recusals are unusual, but not unprecedented," said Paul Shechtman, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor. "This isn't the occasion for one."

Shechtman said allegations of leaks to the media, even if true, are probably not enough to result in a recusal.

"Whatever you think about leaks, if they were grounds for recusal, we would have a great number of recusal motions," he said.

Benjamin Brafman, Strauss-Kahn's defense lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Writing by Daniel Trotta, Additional reporting Joseph Ax and Christine Kearney; Editing by Sandra Maler)

View the original article here

DSK accuser sues NY Post for "prostitute" report (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The hotel maid who accused former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault sued the New York Post and five of its journalists for libel on Tuesday for reporting that she was a prostitute.

The 32-year-old Guinean immigrant accused the Post of publishing defamatory articles between July 2-4 "in an apparent desperate attempt to bolster its rapidly plunging sales."

The suit filed in Bronx state court seeks damages to be determined at trial for articles it said the Post knew were false or should have known were false before they were published.

A spokesman for the Post was not immediately available for comment.

On Friday prosecutors called into question the woman's credibility for a series of lies about her background including a false story about being gang-raped on her application for U.S. asylum.

The Post reported on Saturday that the Sofitel housekeeper "was doing double duty as a prostitute, collecting cash on the side from male guests." An article the following day reported that the housekeeper "continued to work as a prostitute in a Brooklyn hotel where she was stashed by prosecutors."

"All of these statements are false, have subjected the plaintiff to humiliation, scorn and ridicule throughout the world by falsely portraying her as a prostitute or as a woman who trades her body for money and they constitute defamation and libel per se," the suit said.

(Reporting by Noeleen Walder and Jennifer Golson; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Sandra Maler)

(This article has been modified to show the suit has been filed in the Bronx, not Manhattan; fixes number of defendants)

View the original article here

More questions raised about Strauss-Kahn accuser (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Scrutiny of the accuser in the sexual assault case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn intensified on Saturday after more revelations about her conduct following the purported May 14 attack.

A judge released Strauss-Kahn from house arrest and lifted strict bail conditions on Friday after prosecutors discovered a pattern of lying in the accuser's background, although serious charges including sexual assault and attempted rape remain in place against the man once seen a top French presidential contender.

A new report says the 32-year-old woman, a hotel maid, spoke of the possibility of financial gain from the incident.

In a phone conversation with her boyfriend, who was held in an Arizona jail on suspicion of possessing 400 pounds (180 kg) of marijuana, she said there was money to be made from Strauss-Kahn, a law-enforcement source familiar with the investigation told Reuters on Saturday.

The call was recorded and the woman told her boyfriend she was fine and not to worry about her, the source said.

The New York Times quoted a well-placed law enforcement official as saying: "She says words to the effect of, 'Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I'm doing.'"

On Friday, prosecutors said the accuser lied about being gang-raped in Guinea as part of an application for U.S. asylum and changed details of her story about what she did after the incident in Straus-Kahn's luxury hotel suite.

As the woman's stature falls, that of Strauss-Kahn has rebounded. Some in France are talking about a political comeback, although perhaps not to challenge President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.

Strauss-Kahn's whereabouts on Saturday were unknown. He left his Manhattan townhouse and got into a black sedan, followed by a flock of photographers in vehicles and on motorbikes. His car then pulled into a garage with restricted access and he disappeared, thwarting attempts to follow him further.

Revelations about the accuser have left prosecutors struggling to make a case with a central witness whose credibility would be targeted by Strauss-Kahn's defense lawyers.

Investigators once trumpeted the woman as a devout Muslim who immediately reported that Strauss-Kahn, a steward of the world economy from the French elite, sprang naked from the bathroom and forced her to perform oral sex.

Her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, came to her defense on Friday, portraying her as a frightened, illiterate woman who remained a victim, her body badly bruised in the encounter.

"The victim here may have made some mistakes but that doesn't mean she's not a rape victim," Thompson said.

(Additional reporting by Allison Joyce in New York and Leila Abboud in Paris; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Bill Trott)

View the original article here