DA Cyrus Vance…not running for President
If so many Sloggers doubted the veracity of the Diallo family, why didn’t the New York media?
Much of America is waking up to its weekend about now, to discover a growing – and bewildering – farrago of damning evidence about the real character of Sofitel maid and rape accuser Nafissatou Diallo. As the case looks increasingly unlikely ever to come to Court in any kind of detail, senior NYPD sources are even going on the record to put more flesh on the bones of a thousand skeletons in Diallo’s cupboard.
So far today I’ve contacted only one US source. One has to be considerate: it is their weekend after all, and the folks in Washington are only just heading downstairs to open the morning papers. But The Slog’s original banking mole in New York is single, something of a 24/7 person, and eager to speculate about where this thing will go next.
“Certainly in my office, nobody is that surprised,” said the source, “But the sheer extent of spin that has surrounded [the maid] is hard to take in. You have to wonder why anyone, however desperate, would want to use someone like her as a means of nailing DSK. You have to figure that shifting the guy out of the way was only ever meant to be a temporary thing. There’s no way this lady would’ve made it through a Court trauma. Not with Brafman on her case.”
The close time proximity of Lagarde’s IMF victory and DSK’s virtual exoneration would support that view of what’s being going on. But equally, there is ample evidence of a more narrow – perhaps purely opportunist – conspiracy to extort money from Strauss-Kahn.
Diallo’s conversation with a serving prisoner in Arizona has attracted much attention. Police told the New York Times that it was in “a unique dialect of Fulani” and a full translation had not been available until last Wednesday. The Times quotes a “well-placed law enforcement official”: “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.'”
But there’s more. It now turns out that Diallo’s friends have told the NYPD that the Arizona prisoner is her ex-husband. The one she (and her talkative ‘brother’) said was deceased. He went down on drug charges, but is has a long record of involvement in credit-card fraud and other scams.
Other key developments include:
* Nafissatou Diallo was on the 28th floor where Strauss-Kahn’s suite was located the day of the alleged DSK attack – but she normally worked on another floor. It is now alleged by senior hotel employees that she specifically asked to be given the floor while another maid was absent on holiday.
* Further investigation by New York City police detectives working with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance revealed that Diallo has lied about rape before – crucially, to gain entry to the US in the first place.
* The convincing nature of her original testimony to the NYPD was the result of special training. She had rehearsed the narrative of lies for asylum so often – listening to them over and over on an audiotape supplied by a male accomplice in Guinea, in order to hoodwink the US immigration authorities. Assistant DA’s gained this confession from her once it emerged that there were holes and contradictions in Diallo’s story.
*Although allegedly traumatised by the Strauss-Kahn attack, Diallo in fact went to another room and cleaned it immediately afterwards. It wasn’t until she bumped into a senior housekeeper that the maid claimed she had been attacked.
* The New York Post is trailing evidence that Diallo has form as a hooker. (This is a Murdoch-owned tabloid, so let’s not assume anything about truth re this one).
* Diallo was a regular at Café 2115, an African restaurant on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in central Harlem. After the alleged incident, the manager, Blake Diallo, held several press conferences at which he presented himself as the ‘brother’ of the presumed victim. This isn’t the Motormouth Mamoudou Diallo still claiming to be her brother…but whose relationship to the accuser The Slog has always doubted. Even the NYPD, I understand, is now confused as to which Diallos are brothers or brothers-in-law….or simply a collection of men being used to promote an extortion scam.
* Le Monde has learned that Blake Diallo was Senegalese, not Guinean, and that he was her boyfriend, not her brother. Contacted about this, Diallo explained somewhat disingenuously that he had said sister “because in Africa people call each other brother and sister”. Yeh, right. But here too we have a boyfriend in one place, another boyfriend in prison, and a husband supposed to be deceased who isn’t.
Given this huge level of confusion – and the mountain of evidence suggesting that Nafissatou Diallo isn’t exactly in need of any protection – should not the US authorities now release her name? After all, they were happy to have Strauss-Kahn dragged through the mud: or are we to assume that the law is different depending on one’s gender?
Well, to read a column by feminist Joanna Molloy in the New York Daily News today, you’d be inclined to think that. Read it – I urge you to: it is a disturbing example of the lengths to which New York’s liberal Establishment will go in order to shun reality. These extracts are horribly typical:
‘Strauss-Kahn fairly cancanned out of Criminal Court after Judge Michael Obus freed him….He even gets his money back – or his rich wife’s: $1 million in cash and a $5 million bond…steal a loaf of French bread, go to prison; make a lot of French bread, await trial in a mansion…..It would be beyond horrible if this sends a message to rape victims that pressing charges is futile. Meanwhile, Strauss-Kahn is free to travel anywhere in America this holiday weekend, stay anywhere he wants. I wouldn’t want to be the maid who walks into his hotel room.’
Check out the full history of Establishment blindness and media bollocks at THE STRAUSS-KAHN WALTZ.
The Slog 