Journalist's detailed study has unearthed fresh doubts over alleged
assault in New York by ex-IMF chief
Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 26 November 2011 18.18 GMT
New questions have been raised about the events in the New York hotel
room where the former International Monetary Fund head and French
politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn was alleged to have sexually
assaulted a hotel maid.
The case against Strauss-Kahn was eventually dramatically dropped by a
Manhattan court, but the scandal forced him to resign his IMF post and
destroyed his chances of becoming the leading leftwing candidate to
challenge Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.
An exhaustively researched article in the New York Review of Books,
published by veteran American investigative journalist Edward Jay
Epstein, has cast fresh doubt on exactly what happened in the Sofitel
hotel room on 14 May between Strauss-Kahn and his accuser, Guinean-
born maid Nafissatou Diallo.
In passages sure to delight Strauss-Kahn supporters and conspiracy
theorists, Epstein's lengthy article studied hotel door key and phone
records and traced links to Strauss-Kahn's potential political rivals,
appearing to suggest the possibility that he had been set up.
Such allegations have been raised before, especially by some French
media commentators. Some polls taken in France as the scandal
dominated world headlines revealed sympathy for Strauss-Kahn. One
showed that 57% of French people thought he had been the victim of a
smear campaign. Diallo and her lawyers, however, have maintained that
she was the victim of an unprovoked attack. She is now suing the
French statesman in a civil court, which could result in a hefty
damages award.
But Epstein's article does appear to raise some odd questions about
the case. It points out numerous holes and discrepancies in the
accounts of those who portrayed Strauss-Kahn as an attacker,
identifies a missing BlackBerry which may contain warnings to the
Frenchman that he was being set up, and examines possible links
between Sofitel staff and Strauss-Kahn's political opponents.
The most unusual evidence described by Epstein is a security video of
the hotel's engineer, Brian Yearwood, and an unidentified man
apparently celebrating the day's events. Earlier, Yearwood had been
communicating with John Sheehan, a security expert at Accor, which
owns Sofitel, and whose boss, René-Georges Querry, once worked with a
man now in intelligence for Sarkozy.
The unidentified man with Yearwood had been spotted previously on
hotel security cameras accompanying Diallo to the hotel's security
office after the alleged attack. The video shows the men near the area
where Diallo is recounting her story and, less than two minutes after
police have been called, they seem to congratulate each other. "The
two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like
an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes.
They are then shown standing by the service door … apparently waiting
for the police to arrive," Epstein writes.
Epstein meticulously pieces together the movements of hotel staff and
Strauss-Kahn by examining the electronic records left by their room
keys and phones. These show Diallo entered the room between 12.06 and
12.07pm. At 12.13pm, Strauss-Kahn called his daughter about having
lunch. During those six or seven minutes, Diallo said she was brutally
sexually attacked and dragged around the room.
Strauss-Kahn has conceded that a sexual encounter took place but that
it was consensual. By 12.28pm, he had left the hotel and by 12.54pm he
had arrived at a restaurant to meet his daughter. Meanwhile, the
records show that at 12.26pm Diallo entered a nearby room – number
2820 – which she had visited several times that morning before its
guest had checked out. A few minutes later, she returned to Strauss-
Kahn's vacated room and soon after reported an attack to her
supervisor. Sofitel has refused to name the occupant of room 2820.
During her account to investigators, Diallo did not reveal that she
had visited 2820, so the room was not searched by police.
Another potentially odd fact turned up by the room-key records Epstein
examined was that another hotel employee, room service worker Syed
Haque, also entered Strauss-Kahn's hotel room just one minute before
Diallo, apparently to pick up dishes. The keys only record entries,
not exits, so it is not known when Haque left. Haque has refused to be
interviewed by Strauss-Kahn's lawyers.
A final twist is provided by Strauss-Kahn's missing BlackBerry.
Sources close to Strauss-Kahn have told Epstein that the Frenchman
believed the device might be the subject of electronic surveillance.
They claimed that a friend of Strauss-Kahn working as a researcher for
Sarkozy's party in Paris had sent him a text that morning, warning him
that at least one email possibly sent from that BlackBerry to Strauss-
Kahn's wife had turned up at her party offices and been read by her
colleagues.
They also claimed another friend in the French diplomatic corps had
warned him that he might be embarrassed by a scandal. That morning,
Epstein claims, Strauss-Kahn rang his wife and asked her to ask a
friend to arrange for his BlackBerry and iPad to be seen by experts.
However, the BlackBerry, with all its messages, went missing that day.
It was about this phone that Strauss-Kahn rang the hotel from his taxi
on the way to the airport, which allowed staff to tip police off about
his whereabouts. He also asked his daughter to search for it at the
restaurant where they had lunch. A security video shows her looking
for it under tables. Records kept by BlackBerry show the device was
disabled at 12.51pm, stopping it from sending out signals showing its
location. The phone, which does not appear to have left the Sofitel,
has never been found.
Sarkozy's ruling UMP party has dismissed allegations of a political
plot. The secretary-general of the UMP, Jean-François Cope, said
allegations of a political plot were a clumsy manipulation. "As long
as these are just allegations based on anonymous testimony we know
nothing about, you will understand that we remain extremely cautious
and are not fooled," Cope said. "Let me say that it's a bit obvious as
a manipulation."
© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.
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