Luke Ford

According to this Ghana publication from May 18, here is a picture of Nafissatou Diallo, the maid who accused DSK of rape.

Is this really her?

Nafissatou Diallo lied rampantly but the American news media protect her identity.

Here’s the initial story on her as reported overseas: “The maid, Nafissatou Diallo from the West African nation of Guinea, told police that the 62-year-old Strauss-Kahn came out of the bathroom naked, chased her down, forced her to perform oral sex on him and tried to remove her underwear before she broke free and fled the room.”

The New York Post reports that the maid is a hooker:

She was turning tricks on the taxpayers’ dime!
The Sofitel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of a sex attack in his suite wasn’t just a hotel hooker — she continued to work as a prostitute in a Brooklyn hotel where she was stashed by prosecutors, The Post has learned.
The so-called victim, whose web of lies has crippled the Manhattan DA’s case against the former International Monetary Fund boss, played host to a parade of paying male visitors in the weeks after Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, a prosecution source said.
“While she was under our supervision, there were multiple ‘dates’ and encounters at the hotel on the DA’s dime,” the source said of her paid hotel room. “That’s a great deal for her. She doesn’t have to cover her expenses.”
The woman has a regular fleet of gentlemen callers who range from wealthy clients she met at the Sofitel to counterfeit-merchandise hawkers and livery-cab drivers, said sources close to the defense investigation.
Some of her clients also gave her pricey jewelry, the source said.
…Also, The DA suspects that the $100,000 she deposited into her accounts over the last few years included proceeds from sex-for-money exploits, said another prosecution source.

Here’s a French news story about the maid.

Here’s an American article about French news coverage of the maid.

In her LeMonde article, Marion Van Renterghem named the accuser but in this English translation, the name does not appear:

The accuser, who opted to use the Shakespearean name Ophelia at the Manhattan Sofitel where she worked, disappeared from public view immediately after the case broke. She left the apartment in the Bronx where she lived with her 16-year-old daughter and has been under heavy police protection since. The first photograph of her showed her covered with a white sheet as she exited a New York courthouse. Some French papers published a photo said to be her, but that was too blurred for her to be identifiable. What we do know about the presumed victim is that she is a 5’9’’ tall, 32-year-old widow, a Guinean of the Peul tribe who won the right to asylum in the United States. Perhaps in attempt to exonerate their client, Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers have described her as “not very attractive.”

…Places and people that were a part of her life yielded more information about her. In New York, those places included the Sofitel where she had been working for three years, and the African take-away in the Bronx where she worked late shifts after she got back from her hotel job. There was the six-story red brick building with a broken elevator on Gerald Avenue in the Bronx, where the Harlem Community Aids United Center—a foundation dedicated to providing care for HIV/Aids victims—also rented out moderately-priced apartments such as the one she occupied. DSK’s accuser also sometimes went to the Futa mosque, a big red-brick building on the corner of 3rd Avenue. The New York Times dispatched a reporter to Tchakulé, the tiny village on the high plains of Guinea where she was born, but the journalist was unable to find anything that would shed light on the young woman’s personality.
She 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. Appearing tired and overwhelmed, he told reporters that his sister worked hard, was a good Muslim, and wasn’t the type who would attack a man. He added that she felt unwell, was very tired and afraid, and that all she wanted to do was cry.
Blake Diallo also told reporters that his sister had called him in the middle of the afternoon from the hospital the police had taken her to after having heard her account of the alleged event. According to him, still in shock and sobbing, she had blurted out that a man had tried to do something very bad to her. He refuted the idea that his sister could have been part of a set-up, saying that she had no idea who Dominique Strauss-Kahn was and that he had had to explain it to her.
Le Monde learned soon afterward that Blake Diallo was Senegalese, not Guinean, and that he was her boyfriend, not her brother. Contacted about this, Diallo explained somewhat ingenuously that he had said sister “because in Africa people call each other brother and sister.”

The French version of Slate published this article about Nafissatou Diallo, which Slate.com refuses to publish. Here’s a translation:

The daughter of a merchant form the Peule tribe (40% of the population in a country of 10.3 million), she is from the Labé region in Guinea, and followed her husband, a Guinea merchant, to the USA in 1998. There, she divorced him and has been raising her 15 year old daughter alone in the Bronx. She has some family in Harlem, including her sister, who is married to a Guinean business man working in the import-export trade.

Picture of Nafissatou Diallo as shown by her brother in Guinea from BFMTV.com screenshot.

From Paris Match.

Is this really her?

Emma-Kate Symons writes for The Australian:

FEMINISTS in high places should be hanging their heads in shame.

In their desperation to avenge all women victims of sexual assault they gleefully seized on highly dubious and probably fabricated rape claims of one (apparently wealthy, according to mysterious bank transfers) African immigrant woman against a rich, powerful white man.

Rushing to judgment before any substantial investigation or trial, and aided and abetted by a New York Police Department and a prosecutor bent on re-election, they recklessly trashed the reputation of one man for their own ideological ends, even making bizarre links with France’s burka ban.

In their eyes, Dominique Strauss-Kahn had become the grotesque symbol of all that was rotten in the state of patriarchy (and especially in “sexist” France) and therefore not worthy of the minimum presumption of innocence before proved guilty.

Willing accomplices to his crime, French women in their entirety were also put in the dock.

Who could forget Katha Pollitt in US left-wing bible The Nation scorning “pathetic” French women “rising in defence of their right to be pawed by their bosses” and dismissing French feminism as a “small and conflicted” movement that effectively condones sexual predators.

DSK’s wife, Anne Sinclair, was a special target of the woman-hating feminist brigade.