This may or may not be Nafissatou Diallo. Vote now.
How the US news blackout on DSK’s accuser suits the authorities down to the ground.
New York post says that chambermaid has AIDS
Slog research suggests her late husband shot by NYPD in 1999
One of the truly odd things about the Dominic Strauss-Kahn case is that it strays into so many areas of contemporary intolerance – those areas where any reasonable discussion attracts a stream of insults on the comment thread. In this case, there is rape, the Muslim attitude to women in general and sex in particular, dirty geopolitics, the Islamic attitude to the West, underhand US activities behind the scenes of the play being performed for our benefit, the sexual wiring of the Alpha male, and the neurotically desperate desire of all eurocrats to save the currency….aka, save the cosy Franco-German club.
This has been exacerbated by the (standard) policy of the New York judicial authorities in demanding a complete news blackout about the rape accuser. In today’s wonky world, a bloke can be dragged from a plane in handcuffs, frog-marched to an arraignment surrounded by heavies, have his image plastered all over every tabloid and website on the planet, be told by the Federal Reserve he’s no longer wanted in polite company, refused bail for frankly idiotic reasons, put on a suicide wing – and referred to by a leading feminist journalist as ‘the disgraced Dominic Strauss-Kahn’ before a single piece of evidence has been presented to the jury.
But the person who has made the accusation is unknown by name, her real image is disputed, she gets a 24/7 NYPD armed guard, and she lives at a secret address. She is ‘a nice girl’, a ‘very hard worker’, a girl with ‘no agenda’.
From the start of the DSK rape saga in fact, there’s been a cacophony of confusion, mistaken identity, and unividenced claims in relation to Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo’s background: she’s a single mum, she’s a divorcee, she’s a widow, she’s from the Fulani tribe, she’s from the Peule tribe, she arrived in the US seven years ago, she was an asylum seeker. And it’s not helped by the fact that in Guinea, Diallo is akin to Smith in terms of being a common surname. But mainly, it’s because of a barmy feminist pc Establishment that says the accused rapist must go into the media stocks and be vilified, while the accuser must go into hiding and be sanctified.
For what it’s worth, I think the evidence suggests that Dominic Strauss-Kahn is an arrogant, fanny-groping power-freak of the kind I rail against every day on this site. But the Rule of Law is everything, coupled with equality before the law. DSK is not getting an even break here, and that’s the beginning and end of all that matters as far as I’m concerned.
Thus, this strange alliance of Western feminists and misogynist Islam has only itself to blame for the wrong ages, photographs, misinformation and disinformation now circulating around the web about Nafissatou Diallo. But of course, that’s not how the harpy-mullah armies see it.
Overnight, I’ve been forced – for the first time since starting up – to censor a variety of obscenity, false accusation, lurid insults and death-threats received here at Sloggers’ Roost. As you can see, the ones still up there are bad enough. None of this lowlife will get any apology from me. This, dear reader, is where bias, censorship, super-injunction and blackout must always end – a moving target called The Truth. Which is, of course, precisely what the Establishment and their more intolerant lobbyists want.
Anyway, it seems I may have shown the wrong photograph….along with 2.7 million other sites. I started off being about to run another one three days ago, but I sent it to a source who said that’s not her either. So let’s wait until somebody up there says ‘this is her’….and in the meantime try to establish some facts.
What The Slog has established
Like I said, this is easier said than done. For starters – like any good defence lawyer able to smell a cause celebre – Diallo’s lawyer Jeffrey Shapiro is keen to present his client in the best light. But one wonders at times whether even he knows more than a fragment of the truth.
Shapiro told the media last Tuesday that his client “came here seven years ago under very difficult circumstances”.
This is both misleading and wrong. According to French site Slate and Paris Match, she actually arrived in the US during 1998. The Guinea press also confirms this. According to USA Today, Shapiro told the media that his client felt “alone in the world”. This is an odd thing to assert, given that she has a sister, least two cousins, and a dozen or more in-laws with whom she is friendly in the Queens and Harlem districts of New York.
Several media titles have stated that she divorced her husband, but this is also untrue. As the Ghana Times confirms, the Sofitel chambermaid is a widow. Shapiro admits that the father of her daughter “is now dead”. But both he and the authorities have been suitably vague about whether the self-appointed ‘family spokesman’ is her brother, her cousin, or just a family friend.
In fact, what seems most likely is that this gentleman – Mamadou Cherif Diallo – is her cousin-in-law. Diallo is, I think, Nafossatou’s married name. Mamadou describes himself as “working for New York City, which is a tad overstated: he’s a cab driver. He had this to say about his distant relative:
“She is as hard a worker as her sister. She’s a good Muslim. She is really pretty, as are a lot of Peule women, but in our culture, we do not accept this kind of behavior. Seriously, Dominique Strauss-Kahn attacked the wrong person. It’s a scandal! ” Well there you are, fellow decadent infidels: we allow nice girls to be raped, whereas Islam merely stones bad girls to death. However, the leader of her local Mosque says she never went there: Reuters this morning asserts that the cleric ‘does not know her. She was not actively involved in the Muslim community which people in the neighbourhood say should have been hers, based on her native region’.
He has in turn been sparing with the truth when he says his newly famous in-law is “a hard-working, good Muslim girl”. For it now looks odds-on that Nafissatou Diallo is HIV+….suggesting that Dominic Strauss-Kahn may have rather more to worry about than his reputation.
As the New York Post reported yesterday, the IMF chief’s alleged sex-assault victim lives in a Bronx apartment rented exclusively for adults with HIV or AIDS. The maid has occupied the fourth-floor High Bridge flat with her 15-year-old daughter since January — and before that, lived in another Bronx apartment set aside by Harlem Community AIDS United strictly for adults with the virus and their families. The Post adds that adults with children who are HIV+ would not qualify for such a residence. So either Nafissatou is living there under false pretences, or she has AIDS.
This isn’t a disease normally associated with strict Islamic behaviour.
She may, of course, have been infected by her late husband, which suggests he might not be getting any virgins up there either. But we are still unclear on many details: it all comes back to a common surname, and no hacks on the ground digging in New York.
What we must remember is that most Americans so far have no idea as to the identity of the chambermaid. Were they to have such knowledge, it’s quite possible that they would make an instant connection to the surname Diallo: for the shooting of Amatou Diallo in 1999 by four NYPD cops remains one of the most infamous race cases in New York’s history.
Very possibly, Amadou Diallo was Nafissatou Diallo’s husband. Certainly, the timelines are right: both came from Guinea, Amadou arrived in 1997, Nafissatou followed in 1998, their daughter was conceived in 1996, Amadou was shot dead in 1999….and Mamadou Cherif Diallo was his elder cousin. His business went belly up, so now he’s a cabbie. The Slog has even established his licence number – including the bizarre fact that this licence is due for renewal today, May 20th 2011.
Amadou Diallo’s shooting resulted in the four cops standing trial for murder. They repeatedly insisted that their suspect had reached into his pocket, in which they assumed was a weapon – and in the end were acquitted.
What we still don’t know
Why the cops wanted to interview Amadou Diallo in the first place is unclear. But it is a matter of public record that the US authorities, despite the police acquittal, awarded the Diallo family $3 million in damages. What happened to that money, and why is the Diallo family still apparently struggling?
The original Assistant DA’s story was that Nafissatou Diallo was granted entry to the US as part of a political asylum plea. What was the reason for the asylum?
Pictures of DSK were posted throughout the Sofitel venue before his stay there. Why then has Nafissatou’s ‘identification’ of the IMF chief been allowed to stand, given it is hopelessly compromised in law? (At the bail hearing last night, the DA once again repeated this as a ‘fact’ – ‘the defendant was picked out at an ID parade Saturday night’ – and ergo, must be guilty. It’s a travesty of justice).
Although Strauss-Kahn has been at last granted bail – albeit under the most onerous conditions imaginable – why did the DA still argue vehemently against it?
Why has the prosecution been allowed to put DSK in a pigeon-hole marked ‘sex beast’, but the laudatory comments about the maid from her family have not been questioned?
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As we saw with the Bin Laden raid fiasco, secrecy and spin breed false accusation, mass hysteria, gross inaccuracy and zero interrogation of the ‘official version’.
Dominic Strauss-Kahn now was a 24/7 body tag and two police guards, CCTV cameras and a host of alarms where he is living – in the flat newly-rented by his wife, Anne Sinclair. To suggest that it is either unsafe or unfair to release his accuser’s name now is a connerie. They should release it – and see what emerges from a free press being allowed to interrogate both sides in this case.
The Slog 