“Hello? Housekeeping.’
“Hello? Housekeeping,” the Sofitel hotel employee called out. No reply. The door to the bedroom, to her left, was open, and she could see part of the bed. She glanced around for luggage, but saw none.
“Hello? Housekeeping.”
Then a naked man with white hair appeared, as if out of nowhere.
That’s how Nafissatou Diallo describes the start of the explosive incident on May 14 that would forever change her life — and that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until that moment, the man tipped to be the next president of France.
Now the woman known as the “DSK maid” has broken her silence, talking for more than three hours at the office of her attorneys, Thompson Wigdor, on Fifth Avenue.
‘Nafi’ Diallo is not glamorous. Her light brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened, and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure. When her face is in repose, there is an opaque melancholy to it.
Working at the Sofitel for the last three years, with its security and stability, was clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have, after years braiding hair and working in a friend’s store in the Bronx as a newcomer from Guinea in 2003.
Diallo cannot read or write; she has few “close friends”, and some of the men she has spent time with, whom she does not call fiances or boyfriends, but “just friends,” appear to have taken advantage of her. One, now in a federal detention centre in Arizona awaiting deportation after a drug conviction, won her confidence — and, she says, access to her bank accounts — by giving her fake designer bags. “He was my friend that I trust — that I used to trust,” she says.
Some of Diallo’s most upbeat moments in the interview came when she recounted the small promotions and credits available at the Sofitel for a job done well. She was supposed to clean 14 rooms a day for a wage of $25 an hour plus tips, according to her union.
It’s an achievement, Diallo said, to get a whole floor of your own because it saves time going up and down in the elevator to clean individual rooms. Another maid left on maternity leave in April, she said, and she’d gotten the 28th floor.
“I keep that floor. I never had a floor before.” Diallo’s eyes lit up talking about the routine and about her colleagues. “We worked as a team,” she said. “I loved the job. I liked the people. All different countries, American, African, and Chinese. But we were the same there.”
OCCASIONALLY, as Diallo talked, she wept, and there were moments when the tears seemed forced. Almost all questions about her past were met with vague responses. She was reluctant to talk about her father, an imam who ran a Koranic school out of the family home in rural Guinea.
Her husband died of “an illness”, she said. So did a daughter who was 3 or 4 months old. Diallo was raped by two soldiers who arrested her for a curfew violation in Conakry, the Guinean capital. When they had finished with her, they released her the next morning, she said, but made her clean up the scene of the assault.
At first, she said she couldn’t recall what year that happened, but later she said it was 2001. Diallo had managed to get her surviving daughter, now 15, out of Africa and to the US, “for a better life”, she said. But precisely how that happened was not a subject she or her lawyers would explore.
When Diallo reached the point of her alleged assault in the Sofitel, however, her account was vivid and compelling. She said she used up a lot of time waiting for guests to check out of room 2820 before she cleaned it. Then she saw the room-service waiter taking the tray out of 2806, a presidential suite. The waiter said it was empty. But still she decided to check. This is her account.
“Hello? Housekeeping.” Diallo looked around the room. She was standing facing the bedroom in the entrance hall when the naked man with white hair appeared.
“Oh, my God,” said Diallo. “I’m so sorry,” and she turned to leave. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. But he was like “a crazy man to me”. He clutched at her breasts. He slammed the door.
Diallo is about 5 feet 10, considerably taller than Strauss-Kahn, and has a sturdy build. “You’re beautiful,” Strauss-Kahn told her, wrestling her toward the bedroom. “I said, ‘Sir, stop this. I don’t want to lose my job’,” Diallo said. “He said, ‘You’re not going to lose your job’.’’ An ugly incident with a guest — any guest — could threaten everything Diallo had worked for. “I don’t look at him. I was so afraid. I didn’t expect anyone in the room.”
“He pulls me hard to the bed,” she said. He tried to put his penis in her mouth, she said, and tightened her lips and turned her face from side to side to show how she resisted. “I push him. I get up. I wanted to scare him. I said, ‘Look, there is my supervisor right there’. But the man said nobody was going to hear.”
He shoved back, moving her from the bedroom toward the bathroom. Strauss-Kahn pulled her uniform dress up around her thighs and tore down her tights, gripping her crotch so hard that it was still red at the hospital hours later. He pushed her to her knees, her back to the wall. He forced his penis into her mouth, and gripped her head on both sides.
“He held my head so hard here,” she said, putting her hands to her cranium. “He was moving and making a noise. He was going like ‘uhh, uhh, uhh.’ He said, ‘Suck my’ — I don’t want to say.”
The report from the hospital notes that “she felt something wet and sour come into her mouth and she spit it out on the carpet”.
“I got up,” Diallo said. “I was spitting. I run. I run out of there. I don’t turn back. I run to the hallway. I was so nervous, so scared. I didn’t want to lose my job.”
Diallo says she hid around the corner in the hallway near the service lobby and tried to compose herself. Then she saw the man come out of 2806 and head for the elevator. “I don’t know how he got dressed so fast, and with baggage. He looked at me like this.” She inclined her head and stared straight ahead. “He said nothing.”
The entire incident had taken no more than 15 minutes, maybe much less. According to a source, nine minutes after Diallo entered the room, Strauss-Kahn called his daughter.
The maid had left her cleaning supplies in room 2820 when she went to check on Strauss-Kahn’s suite. Now she retrieved them and returned to the suite in which, she says, she had just been attacked. Disoriented, she seems to have sought a kind of solace in resuming her routine.
“I went to the room I have to clean,” she explained. But she couldn’t think how or where to start. “I was so, so, so — I don’t know what to do.”
Prosecutors, losing faith in Diallo’s credibility, would raise an issue about this sequence of events. They said she told the grand jury that after the attack she hid in the hallway, but subsequently changed her story to say she cleaned room 2820 and then began to clean the DSK suite. She disputes that and hotel room-access records support her account.
MANY aspects of her account of the alleged attack are mirrored in the hospital records, in which doctors observed five hours afterward that there was “redness” in the area of the vagina. The medical records also note she complained of “pain to left shoulder”. Weeks later, doctors reexamined the shoulder and found a partial ligament tear.
If there is one inconsistency for defence lawyers to dwell on, it is a passage that says her attacker got dressed and left the room, and “said nothing to her during the incident”. In her police interview, Diallo recalled several statements Strauss-Kahn made during the alleged attack.
Defence lawyers are expected to challenge the nature of her injuries, her recollection of events, the veracity of elements of her life story, and her conduct with other men, if the case proceeds.
Diallo’s supervisor found her in the hallway. She could see Diallo was shaken and upset and asked what was wrong.
“If somebody try to rape you in this job, what do you do?” Diallo asked her. The supervisor was angry when she heard of the assault, Diallo recalled. “She said, ‘The guest is a VIP guest, but I don’t give a damn’.”
Another supervisor came, then two men from hotel security. One of them told Diallo, “If this was me, I would call the police.” At about 1:30pm, an hour after she told the first supervisor, the hotel dialled 911.
At that moment, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was still one of the most powerful men in the world. As head of the IMF, he was the lead player in attempts to keep the global economy from plunging into recession.
He was also getting ready to declare his candidacy for the presidency of France in next year’s election.
Prosecutors have identified a hotel concierge who says DSK made an unwanted advance to her the previous night. They have also identified a blonde American businesswoman observed going into the same elevator as Strauss-Kahn at 1:26am in what appears to have been a consensual relationship.
After checking out of the hotel at 12:28pm on May 14, Strauss-Kahn went to lunch with his youngest daughter, Camille, who had been studying at Columbia University. From there, he went to JFK Airport to catch Air France Flight 23 to Paris.
The next day he was supposed to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel. But as he waited to board the plane, Strauss-Kahn couldn’t find his IMF mobile phone. On another phone, he called the Sofitel to ask if it had been found in the suite. The police, now on the scene, had an employee say yes (although the phone was not there) and ask where they could get it to him.
The Air France terminal, Gate 4, he said, and asked them to rush to get it to JFK before takeoff. Instead, the Port Authority police were notified and, just before the plane was ready to taxi away from the gate, they took Strauss-Kahn off it.
While he languished in the interview room at the Manhattan Special Victims Squad in Harlem, Diallo was taken to the hospital, then back to the hotel with the police to walk through what had happened to her.
AS the day wore on, she became increasingly frantic about her daughter, alone at home. The police finally took her back to the Bronx at 3am. Neither she nor the girl could sleep. “She was so scared,” Diallo said.
But when Diallo watched the morning news, she was terrified: “I watched Channel 7 and they say this is [the] guy — I don’t know — and he is going to be the next president of France. And I think they are going to kill me.” The phone started to ring in her apartment as reporters found her number.
Others appeared at her door. She woke her daughter and told her to pack her bag and get ready to stay with a relative. She told the girl how powerful DSK must be: “Now everybody say everything about me, all the bad things.” The girl tried to reassure her mother. “She says, ‘Please, Mom, don’t hurt yourself. I know one day the truth will come out.’ I was so happy when she said that.”
That afternoon, Diallo went back to the station to look at a lineup of five men. “My heart was like this,” she says, patting her chest. But she knew him immediately. “Number three,” she said, and left as quickly as she could. Later she was housed in a hotel with her daughter for weeks, neither of them allowed cell phones after they were placed in protective custody.
It would be almost two months before she was allowed to return to her apartment. “I don’t know why I have to do these things,” she says. “Is it because he is so powerful?”
To this day, we do not have DSK’s account of what happened in suite 2806. Strauss-Kahn has shielded himself with highly skilled lawyers and investigators who have kept his version of events off the public record. To charges of criminal sexual assault, attempted rape, and related offences, Strauss-Kahn entered a plea of not guilty.
His supporters have attacked the maid’s account, her reputation, her background, and her associations. But Strauss-Kahn’s antecedents surfaced with a vengeance as well.
In 2008, DSK admitted to an affair with a subordinate at the IMF. Speaking to investigators, he called it “a personal mistake and a business mistake”.
In July, a French journalist and novelist, Tristane Banon, filed charges against him in Paris for what she claims was an attempted rape in an apartment where she went to interview him in 2003. She told fellow guests during a TV appearance in 2007 that he had come after her like “a chimpanzee in rut”, and her account bears some similarities to Diallo’s.
Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, is an ambitious politician who is often identified with Strauss-Kahn’s rivals in the French Socialist Party. She recently claimed she herself had had consensual but “brutal” sex with him in 2000. Among DSK’s acquaintances, dinner-party conversation is rife with tales of close calls and wild encounters. One French magazine calls him “Dr Strauss and Mr Kahn”.
He also has long enjoyed a reputation as being hugely charming and seductive.
DNA evidence in suite 2806 — the result of all that spitting that mingled the maid’s saliva and Strauss-Kahn’s sperm — makes it virtually impossible to deny there was a sexual encounter between DSK and Diallo. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers raised the possibility early on that it was consensual and have left it to others to speculate about the circumstances under which that might have been the case: that Diallo expected money that she did not receive, or that the sex got rougher and more aggressive than she would accept.
THE New York Post published stories attributed to an anonymous source that claimed Diallo was at least a part-time prostitute. Her lawyers are now suing, saying the story is false. The news-paper stands by its story.
Diallo doesn’t disguise her anger at Strauss-Kahn. “Because of him they call me a prostitute. 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 said she hoped God punishes him. “We are poor, but we are good,” she said. “I don’t think about money.”
Perhaps. But on the day of the incident, by Diallo’s own account, she made two telephone calls. One was to her daughter. The other call was to Blake Diallo, a Senegalese from the same ethnic group but no relation. He manages a restaurant, the Cafe 2115 in Harlem, where West Africans gather to eat, talk, politic, and sometimes listen to concerts.
Nafissatou describes Blake as “a friend,” and one of the first things he did was to find her a personal injury lawyer on the internet.
More problematic were a series of phone calls Diallo received from Amara Tarawally, whose uncle owned the bodega where Diallo worked when she first came to the US. Originally from Sierra Leone, he divided his time between New York and Arizona, where he sold T-shirts and fake designer handbags. But last year he was busted in a sting operation run by Arizona police when, according to cops, he paid them almost $40,000 cash (€28,276) for over 100 pounds of marijuana.
On July 1, The New York Times reported the existence of a taped conversation between Diallo and Tarawally. The article said they talked the day after the incident at the Sofitel and quoted 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 at the time, prosecutors did not have a full transcript of the call, which had been conducted in a dialect of Fulani. The quote was a paraphrase from a translator’s summary of the tape, and the actual words are somewhat different, sources claim.
In July, Tarawally insisted that the quotation must refer to a later conversation and in any case, was taken out of context. Diallo said she no longer talks to Tarawally. He used her bank account to move tens of thousands of dollars around the country without informing her, she said. She denied he ever gave her money to spend. “Like I say, he was my friend. I used to trust him.”
But the list of reasons for prosecutors to doubt Diallo’s credibility does not begin or end with Tarawally. In a letter to DSK’s defence lawyers on June 30, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr cited several lies and deceptions in her past. She had claimed deductions for two children on her taxes instead of one. She had understated her income to get cheaper housing. And, most important, she had lied on her asylum application.
Diallo, a widow, came to the US in 2003, leaving her then 7-year-old daughter behind in Guinea with a brother. Having entered the US without working papers, she lived with family members for some time, eking out an income braiding hair and then working in the Bronx.
In late 2003, Diallo applied for asylum. Because she had suffered genital mutilation as a child, which doctors confirmed in a medical report, she probably would have qualified for asylum. And she insists she was raped by two soldiers.
But bad as the realities were in Diallo’s homeland, she admits the account she gave the US government on her asylum application was heavily embellished. Her narrative worked to get her a green card and allow her bring her child to the US. But her misstatements may make it impossible to win a criminal case against DSK based on her testimony.
Prosecutors are likely weeks away from making a decision on whether to proceed with the charges. They remain confident that the forensic evidence shows a sexual encounter and impressed by the consistency of the story Diallo told to two supervisors, two hotel security guards, hospital personnel and detectives during the first 24 hours.
Given the issues of Diallo’s credibility, investigators have been building a “suspect profile” of DSK, interviewing other women who claim to have been assaulted or who had consensual affairs, trying to establish a pattern of behaviour and comparing it to Diallo’s account.
In mid-July, they talked with the lawyer for Tristane Banon. Prosecutors have begun the process of asking French authorities to let her speak to US officials.
Almost immediately after the indictment was secured, and long before the public knew of the problems with Diallo’s past, prosecutors began digging around in her financial records and interviewing friends, looking for any evidence of extortion or criminal activity. The review found ties to shady acquaintances and suspicious transactions, to be sure, but no evidence of a premeditated plot against Strauss-Kahn.
It is possible that Diallo is a woman who has lived for the last few years on the margins of quasi-illegal immigrant society in the Bronx, associating with con artists and dubious types trying to get a foothold in the US . But that does not preclude her having been the victim of a predatory and powerful man. Nor does it mean she will rule out an attempt to make some money from the situation.
Given the climate of suspicion that developed around her, Diallo’s last three encounters with authorities, on June 8, 20, and 28, were difficult sessions, as prosecutors grilled her like a defendant. The mistrust between Vance and Diallo’s lawyers boiled over on July 1, when Kenneth Thompson held a news conference in front of the courthouse and accused the DA of abandoning Diallo.
Since then, both sides have tried to smooth matters over. Thompson has signalled a willingness to let his client be interviewed again if prosecutors let her see a transcript of the disputed prison call, and that is something prosecutors say they are willing to do. But the tensions could be renewed again after prosecutors learn of Diallo’s decision to go public after weeks of remaining in protective custody.
Diallo says she gave the interview to Newsweek to correct the misleading portrayal of her in the media. Her account of what happened has remained the same all along, she says. “I tell them about what this man do to me. It never changed. I know what this man do to me.”
Looking to the future, Diallo says she would love to go back working in a hotel, but maybe in the laundry. She wants never again to have to knock on a door and say: “Hello? Housekeeper.”
(c) 2011, Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved.
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