DSK IMF SETUP?

November 26, 2011 8:52 PM

Was Dominique Strauss Kahn set up? This recent NYRB article suggests that there was some serious skullduggery going on, although that doesn't mean that DSK isn't guilty of something.
posted by cell divide (141 comments total)

The only conspiracy was between his penis and testes.
posted by Renoroc at 9:08 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]

"He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming."

It would seem prudent, if you suspect you're being set up for a scandal, to not have a hurried sexual encounter with your maid, regardless of its consentuality.
posted by modernserf at 9:09 PM on November 26, 2011 [21 favorites]

to not have a hurried sexual encounter with your maid

Probably so, but that's not a crime.

The whole thing does reek of a set-up.
posted by empath at 9:15 PM on November 26, 2011

What took place between DSK and the maid in those six to seven intervening minutes is a matter of dispute. DNA evidence found outside the bathroom door showed her saliva mixed with his semen. The New York prosecutor concluded that a “hurried sexual encounter” took place and DSK’s lawyers have admitted as much, while claiming that what happened was consensual. The maid has brought a civil suit claiming he used force. It is not clear when she left the room since key card records do not show times of exit. What is known is that DSK called his daughter on his IMF BlackBerry at 12:13 to tell her he would be late.

Of course he was set-up. And so was the maid.

This guy's sexual peccadillos were no secret apparently. Someone arranged for an "escort" to be waiting in his room, telling him: "She'll be dressed like the maid and she'll act as if she has no idea what you are talking about and she'll resist just enough, you know?"

It's Machiavellian: the woman who is the real victim in all of this is completely innocent, DSK is completely guilty of rape, and the only cog in the machine was the woman's dodgy record that prevented the prosecution from pursuing the case. Well that and the fact that DSK has friends as well as enemies.
posted by three blind mice at 9:18 PM on November 26, 2011 [6 favorites]

Fascinating article. I wonder if we will ever learn who was in room 2820. The rapid disabling of the lost Blackberry is also an interesting detail.
posted by jayder at 9:22 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

This guy's sexual peccadillos were no secret apparently. Someone arranged for an "escort" to be waiting in his room, telling him: "She'll be dressed like the maid and she'll act as if she has no idea what you are talking about and she'll resist just enough, you know?"

Huh, where did you read this?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:22 PM on November 26, 2011 [3 favorites]

I have no problem believing both that he's a skeezy dude and that he was setup.
posted by auto-correct at 9:27 PM on November 26, 2011 [13 favorites]

This part was really interesting, discussing the Hotel security guy and an unidentified man who was previously escorting Ms. Diallo:

Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, 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 must have been really happy, 3 minutes is a really long time to dance without music. Try it!
posted by cell divide at 9:29 PM on November 26, 2011 [25 favorites]

It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal.

It wasn't the UMP who ejaculated all over the maid.

The whole thing does reek of a set-up.

Just like Marion Berry, right? "Bitch Set Me Up!" -- He was still smoking crack.

Fascinating article. I wonder if we will ever learn who was in room 2820. The rapid disabling of the lost Blackberry is also an interesting detail.

It's not an interesting detail if you think he might have been guilty, he could have disabled it to avoid location based tracking.

Anyway, it seems pretty unlikely to me that Nafissatou Diallo was actually a french spy sent by Sarkozy to seduce and then claim she was raped, don't you think she would have had her story straighter? Wouldn't they have picked someone with a less dodgy past?

Some of this stuff is like 'The Umbrella Man', just random coincidences in the details that don't really mean anything.
posted by delmoi at 9:34 PM on November 26, 2011 [3 favorites]

It's not an interesting detail if you think he might have been guilty

Huh? Not interesting if he might have been guilty?

I think that's what we're trying to figure out here.

Perhaps you meant, "It's not an interesting detail if you've already decided he was guilty"?
posted by jayder at 9:41 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]

If the data from the hotel's security system is correct then the encounter was remarkably brief; it took place immediately before DSK was due to leave for the airport; and the maid's pattern of movement was very odd. The maid definitely lied about entering suite 2820, and her account of the alleged assault is inconsistent with the brief time that she could have spent with DSK. This doesn't mean that no rape took place; it just means that we have no evidence that the intercourse wasn't consensual.

The story about the Blackberry is coincidental; I can easily believe that a man rushing to the airport after a brief sexual encounter might leave something behind. I can also believe that the maid would have stolen it: thieves are liars even if not all liars are thieves. Occam's razor leads me to think that they had a brief, probably commercial, consensual sexual encounter; he left his Blackberry behind when he departed; she stole the Blackberry and hid it in room 2820 or elsewhere; she then falsely accused DSK of rape.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:43 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]

Occam's razor leads me to think that they had a brief, probably commercial, consensual sexual encounter;

Yeah, we all know women are much more likely to lie about rape then men, that's just Occam's razor.
posted by delmoi at 9:44 PM on November 26, 2011 [23 favorites]

So, was he set up in the other situations where he has been accused of not being entirely interested in the consent of a woman as well?
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:47 PM on November 26, 2011 [12 favorites]

No one in that position is innocent.
posted by The Whelk at 9:53 PM on November 26, 2011 [2 favorites]

There is entirely too much speculation floating about to arrive at any semi-informed conclusion. Everything is a set up (incl. NYRB no doubt) and everyone is shallow and sleazy with the moral predisposition of a parasite. We all should be compensated.
posted by peacay at 9:53 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]

Yeah, we all know women are much more likely to lie about rape then men, that's just Occam's razor.

You're leaving out the references to other details and misrepresenting Joe's comment in a pretty ugly way there.
posted by Anything at 10:08 PM on November 26, 2011 [29 favorites]

-So, was he set up in the other situations where he has been accused of not being entirely interested in the consent of a woman as well?-

You know, I think it's incumbent upon you to back that up with something concrete.

Also, let's say, for argument's sake, that he's always been set up : how would you suggest he clear his name?

No, I'm not saying that I think the guy is an upstanding paragon of feminism, but it always feels kind of skeevy and an unnecessary pile-on to just trot out unsubstantiated rumours and innuendo. Yes, I seem to recall that there was something in the press about this months back, but has any of it been proved??

Otherwise: where do we draw the line in situations like this? (that's only partly rhetorical; I'm sure I've been as quick-mouthed about other things in the past, but I'd really like to know when it's just slander/character assassination and when it's legitimate commentary)
posted by peacay at 10:11 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

Joe in Australia: “... she then falsely accused DSK of rape.”

This part makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Seriously, if you're going by Occam's Razor, why in flaming hell would you posit that a maid, a woman who is by all accounts at the bottom of the totem pole in the socioeconomic sense and who therefore clearly has nothing to gain and everything to lose – a woman whom you furthermore posit has just stolen a smart phone and lied about it, and is, by claiming this rape, throwing great gobs of light on that theft – in short, why would this woman ever, in ten billion years, want to claim that this had happened?

Seriously, ending your theory with "she then falsely accused DSK of rape" is like ending a mathematical proof with "the magical pixies then fly out of my ass and grant me ten wishes."
posted by koeselitz at 10:16 PM on November 26, 2011 [18 favorites]

Just like Marion Berry, right? "Bitch Set Me Up!" -- He was still smoking crack.

Yes, but consent isn't an issue there.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:16 PM on November 26, 2011

"No one in that position is innocent."

What horseshit.

If adults engage in consensual sex, that's not a crime regardless of how wealthy or powerful somebody is.

If he forced her against her will, it was rape.

Very significant difference.
posted by bardic at 10:18 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]

Peacay, I think accusations of attempted rape is more than unsubstantiated rumour and innuendo.
posted by smoke at 10:20 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

Occam's razor leads me to think

Well, that's the thing about setups. They're made to have Occam's Razor-type thinking support them.
posted by ctmf at 10:20 PM on November 26, 2011 [9 favorites]

This is an interesting article. Thanks for posting it. As for the details, here's what jumps out at me from a MetaFilter standpoint:

DSK’s BlackBerry, with its messages, is still missing. Investigations by both the police and private investigators retained by DSK’s lawyers failed to find it. While DSK believed he had left it in the Sofitel, the records obtained from BlackBerry show that the missing phone’s GPS circuitry was disabled at 12:51. This stopped the phone from sending out signals identifying its location. Apart from the possibility of an accident, for a phone to be disabled in this way, according to a forensic expert, required technical knowledge about how the BlackBerry worked.

Since MetaFilter—especially its vocal contingent—consists largely of IT staff, this is the point I'd be interested in your insight on. Is this true? If a random thief found the phone and simply turned its power off, or removed its battery, or hit "Erase" or "Restore to Factory Settings"...would those have the same effect of obscuring the phone's location, or does it really require some specialized knowledge beyond what the average user who hasn't read the manual can do?
posted by red clover at 10:21 PM on November 26, 2011 [7 favorites]

Yeah, we all know women are much more likely to lie about rape then men, that's just Occam's razor.

Certainly not, but when the accuser has admitted to lying about being raped in the past, has $100,000 in cash deposited in her account by a West African mobster, and has some pretty serious inconsistencies in her story about the events around the alleged assault by Strauss-Kahn, then I'm afraid Occam's razor does indeed cut pretty clearly.

Look, I thought he was guilty as sin when this whole thing started, and I continue to think the way he treats women is disgusting (the allegations by Tristane Banon being particularly disturbing), but the case against him in this instance stinks to high heaven, and the prosecutors had good reason to drop it.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 10:22 PM on November 26, 2011 [6 favorites]

--Peacay, I think accusations of attempted rape is more than unsubstantiated rumour and innuendo.--

True. They are unproven accusations. But when they are repeated or alluded to here sans linkage they are unsubstantiated rumours and innuendo.
posted by peacay at 10:25 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

"Since MetaFilter—especially its vocal contingent—consists largely of IT staff, this is the point I'd be interested in your insight on. Is this true? If a random thief found the phone and simply turned its power off, or removed its battery, or hit "Erase" or "Restore to Factory Settings"...would those have the same effect of obscuring the phone's location, or does it really require some specialized knowledge beyond what the average user who hasn't read the manual can do?"

The operative phrase is "Apart from the possibility of an accident," which is one of those questions that Occam's razor can be accurately applied to. It's much more likely that the phone broke than thinking that a technical wizard disabled the phone.
posted by klangklangston at 10:27 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

The operative phrase is "Apart from the possibility of an accident," which is one of those questions that Occam's razor can be accurately applied to. It's much more likely that the phone broke than thinking that a technical wizard disabled the phone.

Or a technical wizard struck the phone repeatedly with a sledgehammer in order to disable the phone. When it comes to electronic media, physical destruction is often your best bet when you want to prevent someone from recovering the data.
posted by zachlipton at 10:31 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

You know, I think it's incumbent upon you to back that up with something concrete.

Well there's Tristane Banon, as smoke pointed out above, where the case was dropped due to the statue of limitations, even though prosecutors said there was evidence of 'sexual aggression'. And there's Piroska Nagy's case (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/17/dominique-strauss-kahn-piroska-nagy), when she worked at IMF.

Admittedly, none of these have ever gone to court and none proves that he committed rape, but it seems unlikely that were these all set ups, too? (And it strikes me that it would have easier for Sarkozy and co to have turned to one of these women or another subordinate rather than setting up this elaborate plot in the US.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 10:34 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]

A cell phone can be tracked in many different ways besides using GPS. So just disabling the GPS won't do, you probably have to turn off the phone completed and maybe even more in certain cases.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:37 PM on November 26, 2011

jayder: Huh? Not interesting if he might have been guilty? I think that's what we're trying to figure out here. Perhaps you meant, "It's not an interesting detail if you've already decided he was guilty"?”

But it's not about whether we want him to be guilty or not. Rationally, let's be honest. In this case, Occam's Razor is a lot cleaner. What possibility requires the least theorizing and resolves the question in the simplest way? That DSK still has the phone, and disabled it himself, or that he dropped and lost it and it broke.

This is just one detail, but in this particular detail, it seems to make very little sense to make up complicated conspiracy theories when there are a billion ways a phone can go dead that don't involve Mafiosi and West African gangsters and whatever.
posted by koeselitz at 10:38 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

Foci for Analysis: “A cell phone can be tracked in many different ways besides using GPS. So just disabling the GPS won't do, you probably have to turn off the phone completed and maybe even more in certain cases.”

Like, er, have it slip out of your pocket onto the street right before a taxi rolls by. That's not exactly technical super-genius.
posted by koeselitz at 10:41 PM on November 26, 2011

Occam's Razor is not the same thing as "here's what I think happened"
posted by Hoopo at 10:42 PM on November 26, 2011 [35 favorites]

---Admittedly, none of these have ever gone to court and none proves that he committed rape, but it seems unlikely that were these all set ups, too? (And it strikes me that it would have easier for Sarkozy and co to have turned to one of these women or another subordinate rather than setting up this elaborate plot in the US.)---

Mm. I wonder what Banon's mother admitting that she had consensual sex with DSK does to the case!? [or should it have been suppressed??]

See, I don't have much of an opinion about all this (other than the one in my first comment here where I want compensation for myself). And I realise that these kinds of proceedings often go to a "he said she said" situation and traditionally this has favoured the rapist, but I continue to baulk at the ease with which the press (mostly) and even commenters on a random message board can contribute to the absolute shredding of a guy's reputation because it's topical or because the guy's famous or the whathaveyou.

I've always had these misgivings about publically identifying the accused in cases of sexual harassment or rape and my lawyer-nephews have tried a few times to school me about why, in fact, it would be showing legal favour to change who gets identified according to category. It's always seemed to me to be a different thing to be accused of stealing a car as against workplace harassment (or worse), for instance.

You can never ever ever ever fix up the wrong if the accusation is false. This goes double or triple, I suppose, for accusations of pedophilia (just ask Arthur C Clarke). I can't for the life of me work out a way to accept this as the "normal situation". And of course, I'm all for revealing the accused's name if they're convicted (or maybe even if the crown prosecutor etc says that there's sufficient evidence). This all remains a big question mark for me.
posted by peacay at 11:01 PM on November 26, 2011

Certainly not, but when the accuser $100,000 in cash deposited in her account by a West African mobster, and has some pretty serious inconsistencies in her story about the events around the alleged assault by Strauss-Kahn, then I'm afraid Occam's razor does indeed cut pretty clearly.

Yet, on the other hand this wasn't even the first person to accuse DSK of sexual assault. Another woman did so, on tape, years prior.

Occam's razor states: "simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones." Simpler in this case does not mean "more consistent with my pre-existing biases" This isn't even the first woman who's accused DSK of sexual assault, why is that not part of the equation here?

Furthermore, looking at wikipedia

In science, Occam’s razor is used as a heuristic (general guiding rule or an observation) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models.[8][9] In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.

In other words, simply saying that you think your theory is simpler does not mean that your theory is true

So on the one hand you have a story that goes

DSK sexually assaulted a maid at a hotel, then she told the police about it

On the other hand you have a story that goes:

DSK got a consentual blowjob from maid at a hotel, then she decided to frame him as sexually assaulting her

So how is the second actually 'simpler' then the first? They both take about the same amount of text to describe, with the second one taking slightly more text. Both of these people have sketchy backgrounds, but as far as I know no one has accused Diallo of trying to frame them or extort money from them, while people have accused DSK of sexually assaulting them. And sexual assault is much more common then extortion.
posted by delmoi at 11:07 PM on November 26, 2011 [7 favorites]

Although some crazy theory about Dialo working for Sarkozy through the African mob probably can be cut out by Occam's Razor.
posted by delmoi at 11:08 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

When you combine the fact that the phone was already suspected to be hacked, a lying housekeeper who kept ducking into the room next door but denied it when queried by authorities, the possible or likely involvement of DSK's political opponents to discredit him by brilliantly setting him up in a way that was in line with his randy reputation ... I would say Occam's Razor --- the idea that the simplest explanation is the most likely one --- leads us to the conclusion that the Blackberry was intentionally disabled.
posted by jayder at 11:08 PM on November 26, 2011

delmoi: They both take about the same amount of text to describe, with the second one taking slightly more text.

No comment on the actual story, but economy of expression isn't the index of complexity.
posted by Gyan at 11:27 PM on November 26, 2011 [6 favorites]

Mm. I wonder what Banon's mother admitting that she had consensual sex with DSK does to the case!?

Uh, nothing? Why would a different person having had sex with him years before have anything to do with an assault?

I appreciate your longer comment, but you're not coming off very well here; it looks like you're hunting for excuses as to why he couldn't have sexually assaulted anyone. No one on mefi will ever know the truth of course, but to act like questions of his predatory behaviour aren't valid is a little bit... off, given his history.
posted by smoke at 11:31 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

--it looks like you're hunting for excuses as to why he couldn't have sexually assaulted anyone--

Oh bullshit. What you mean is that because I'm not jumping on the bandwagon I must be an infidel. I mentioned Banon's mother simply because it is an ultra-weird little factoid. It goes to nothing most likely, but it's not nothing given that she's the mother of the man accused of raping her daughter.
posted by peacay at 11:35 PM on November 26, 2011

There's not enough information in the public domain to make a reasonable judgement as to this article's theory. The identity of the guest in 2820, the testimony of the other hotel employee who entered DSK's room, and the identity of the man who was with Diallo after she reported the rape are all key facts missing from this article. Without them it's easy to conjure up thoughts of a conspiracy, but really they could be quite irrelevant.
posted by Jehan at 11:36 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

errr... ...given that she's the mother of the woman who accuses DSK of rape.
posted by peacay at 11:37 PM on November 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

DSK got a consentual blowjob from maid at a hotel, then she decided to frame him as sexually assaulting her

The alternative theory is that she was paid to frame him up front.
posted by empath at 11:46 PM on November 26, 2011

What you mean is that because I'm not jumping on the bandwagon I must be an infidel.

I think one big issue that is not mentioned in all of this is that where DSK is concerned there wasn't initially that much of a bandwagon to jump on even before the whole case against him collapsed. There was an instantaneous chorus of people crying foul about his treatment including Bernard-Henri Lévy. There were also many accusations that this was a set-up; it really wasn't until all the other accusations about his behaviour, and about sexual harassment as an issue in French politics, came out that that attitude shifted in France. Which is where he would have been running for office, not the US. In fact the horror of seeing DSK carried off in cuffs was apparently shocking to many commentators.

So, imagine this is a massive conspiracy run by some French faction; you think they might have anticipated this. But let's grant they didn': it is possible that not only did they set him up in France, but they also paid off the two other women who accused him (and that the mother of one these women had sex with him is neither here nor there, surely), embroiling him in a massive network of lies... Or: there was no conspiracy and whatever happened in that hotel room has nothing to do with anyone except the two people involved.

Personally, whatever did happen in New York, the balance of the other information that came out about DSK's treatment of women did not inspire confidence in me that this was a man who should be put in charge of a small coop of chickens, let alone the French Republic.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:53 PM on November 26, 2011 [6 favorites]

The preponderance of news accounts about sex crimes tend to overwhelmingly search the victim's background for dirt and tend to assume that anything less than Caesar's wife levels of modesty and chastity means the woman is lying. If I were a genius evil mastermind determined to bring about the fall of a powerful man, and I intended to set him up for a sexual crime, this is the primary consideration I would take into account. Therefore, my false-rape-claiming 'victim' would have to be as pure as a nun, possibly purer.

Unless we want to assume that the people running a game like this are shrewd enough to plan a thing like this, but too dumb to realize that every rape case ever hinges on whether or not the woman could be, in whatever tenuous way, 'asking for it', I don't know that I can accept the evil mastermind hypothesis. I don't know what went on in that hotel, but I'm really dubious about the idiot savant international diplomatic criminal conspiracy angle.
posted by winna at 11:54 PM on November 26, 2011 [16 favorites]

Is it necessarily lying if she didn't mention going in to another room? I know that in times of even mild distress that I'm a completely flakey and unreliable witness to insignificant things I did.

I can't imagine that a woman who had been raped would be all that clear, necessarily. I would be a jumble of emotions, impressions and smells...not a neat, time-accurate narrative. I'm really pleased I have never had to be a witness in my own defense. I'd be hung with my own testimony due to inconsistencies....I couldn't even accurately tell you which order I went to the differents shops today, or in which one I bought what.

Flakey story does not mean liar, necessarily.
posted by taff at 12:06 AM on November 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

DSK's treatment of women did not inspire confidence in me that this was a man who should be put in charge of a small coop of chickens, let alone the French Republic.

Just like Bill Clinton was a terrible president. Thank God we got those non-BJ-getters Bush and Obama after.
posted by drjimmy11 at 12:11 AM on November 27, 2011 [4 favorites]

No comment on the actual story, but economy of expression isn't the index of complexity.

I didn't say it was. But, Feel free to share your complexity metric when dealing with human stories. "Occams Razor" is for things like mathematical equations, where you can simply count the number of variables and operators. It's not literally possible to measure the complexity in situations like this. You could go by the number of people involved you have two in each case.

The alternative theory is that she was paid to frame him up front.

Yeah, that's the time cube/controlled demolition type theory. There are actually an infinite number of possible theories, some less ridiculous then others.
posted by delmoi at 12:13 AM on November 27, 2011

Thank God we got those non-BJ-getters Bush and Obama after.

I hesitate to speculate about Bush and Obama's sexual lives, but it is possible - just possible! - that one could have one and be in a consensual and equal relationship with the person giving it.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:18 AM on November 27, 2011 [4 favorites]

If William of Ockham were alive today, he'd be saying "what am I doing in this grave?" And that's about it, because his razor is a little too rusty for this case.

Look, we've got:

1. People who absolutely know that a rape was committed and this is all just a sideshow to cover it up or a classic rape-culture attempt by the patriarchy to protect a powerful man and blame the victim.

2. People who absolutely know that no rape was committed and this is all just a scandal cooked up by a conspiracy of entrenched elites to embarrass a reformer and keep him from threatening them.

Meanwhile, not a damn one of us here knows what happened in that hotel room, nor will we ever. So what exactly are we accomplishing by putting a banker and a maid on trial in the comments section?
posted by ubernostrum at 12:23 AM on November 27, 2011 [16 favorites]

WE'RE GONNA GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS, THAT'S WHAT
posted by Hoopo at 12:47 AM on November 27, 2011 [10 favorites]

Well there's Tristane Banon, as smoke pointed out above, where the case was dropped due to the statue of limitations, even though prosecutors said there was evidence of 'sexual aggression'. And there's Piroska Nagy's case (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/17/dominique-strauss-kahn-piroska-nagy), when she worked at IMF.

There's also the absurdly juicy ongoing Carlton scandal, with allegations of call-girls being flown to DSK's IMF office. (I'm sorry for linking to the "Telegraph", whose hack also manages to mangle the translation of "libertine" as "libertarian", but it's the most complete account I can find in English).

I think it's pretty much established (he's admitted as much himself) that DSK has a rather tenuous hold on his sexual impulses. I consider it quite likely that he was set up, one way or another, in the Sofitel. I also consider that whoever set him up did France and even his own Socialist Party a huge favour. If this had exploded after the Socialist primaries, the entire Socialist Party would have been annihilated. DSK turned out not only to be easily blackmailable, which is not something you want in the leader of a nuclear nation, but also completely inept in damage control: his political fate was sealed not so much by the scandal itself as by the TV interview he gave upon his return to France.
posted by Skeptic at 1:03 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

> Look, we've got:

> 1. People who absolutely know that a rape was committed and this is all just a sideshow to cover it up or a classic rape-culture attempt by the patriarchy to protect a powerful man and blame the victim.

> 2. People who absolutely know that no rape was committed and this is all just a scandal cooked up by a conspiracy of entrenched elites to embarrass a reformer and keep him from threatening them.

I see plenty of Class 1, and plenty of Class 1.5 (he's got a dodgy record, but in this instance, we are agnostic), but nobody at all falling into Class 2.

Despite that, this thread is rapidly giving the Daily Mail a run for its money in the reasoned debate stakes. This is not metafilter's finest hour.
posted by stonepharisee at 1:49 AM on November 27, 2011

Therefore, my false-rape-claiming 'victim' would have to be as pure as a nun, possibly purer.

Surely it's hard to convince people like that to falsely accuse someone of rape, though.

I agree that we will never know exactly what happened, but two things stand out for me:

1. Just as it seems unfair to hold Diallo's past against her in judging her story, it seems unfair to hold past allegations against Strauss-Kahn.

2. Three minutes is a long time for random dancing. That needs to be explained.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:02 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

If I were a genius evil mastermind determined to bring about the fall of a powerful man, and I intended to set him up for a sexual crime, this is the primary consideration I would take into account. Therefore, my false-rape-claiming 'victim' would have to be as pure as a nun, possibly purer.

We're trading hypotheticals here, but note that if your genius evil mastermind plan was just to remove DSK from the running --- and not necessarily to get him behind bars --- it's been working quite well so far. In fact, having compromised the victim actually helps move the focus to her and her criminal connections, leaving you more time to focus on important chin-stroking and maniacal laughter activities.
posted by Dr Dracator at 2:06 AM on November 27, 2011 [4 favorites]

There's lots that's strange in this case. It seems strange to me that he didn't notice that his phone was gone for a comparatively long time. I don't know many busy people who don't check their phone when they're alone in a cab, and the fact that he thought he'd left it in the restaurant suggests that he was pretty sure he'd left with it. Plus he was travelling very light, so it's not like it could have been buried in a bag.

The whole affair very strange, but I think a complicated set-up is unlikely.
posted by DanCall at 2:07 AM on November 27, 2011

Whether the sexual encounter that took place was consensual or not (and whether DSK was aware that no really meant no--which I can't even believe I'm typing), I'm still constantly amazed but unsurprised at the efforts made by journalists, politicians, and citizens alike to find a way to exonerate DSK and destroy Diallo. Things haven't changed much.
posted by LMGM at 2:08 AM on November 27, 2011

Delmoi wrote: Yeah, we all know women are much more likely to lie about rape then men, that's just Occam's razor.

We know that this woman was lying about this rape, given the facts in the article. We are told that the events must have taken place within 6-7 minutes. According to the article she allegedly suffered a

brutal and sustained sexual attack in which DSK locked the suite door, dragged her into the bedroom, and then dragged her down the inner corridor to a spot close to the bathroom door—a distance of about forty feet—and, after attempting to assault her both anally and vaginally, forced her twice to perform fellatio.

I should point out that the article describes her as being 5' 10" tall, quite tall for a woman. DSK doesn't look as though he's very tall or in very good shape. How long would it take him to subdue someone taller and younger than him and drag her through a bedroom and down a hallway? And then force her to perform fellatio not once, but twice, after failing to rape her both anally and vaginally? I would think that even someone larger, younger, and fitter would have difficulty in doing this - assuming that he had a remarkably short refractory period.

So, please, don't give me the "yeah, we all know women lie about rape herf derf". This woman is clearly lying. I don't know what your hypothetical rape involved, but she didn't allege that anything like that happened. She alleged these facts, and they're disproven by electronic records.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:09 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'll just address the size difference thing...she is a maid, he is a visibly wealthy man (presidential suite). He didn't have to use mere physical force to make her capitulate. She may not have fought back at all, or not substantially. In terms of life crushing destruction, she may have felt she had much more to lose than he did. And maybe rape culture means women know they won't be believed and that she would somehow end up in trouble. Which she did.

Just throwing a woman's perspective in there.
posted by taff at 3:20 AM on November 27, 2011 [11 favorites]

We're trading hypotheticals here, but note that if your genius evil mastermind plan was just to remove DSK from the running --- and not necessarily to get him behind bars --- it's been working quite well so far. In fact, having compromised the victim actually helps move the focus to her and her criminal connections, leaving you more time to focus on important chin-stroking and maniacal laughter activities.

Sure, if you're into the conspiracy theory, you might want to hurt him enough to take him out of the running, but not enough to actually throw him in prison for years, as that would simply be unsportsmanlike.

I'm certainly not saying I know what happened for sure, but on the balance I find a sexual assault the more likely scenario. If I had to put money on it I'd put somewhere around 3:4 odds on it, not enough for a conviction, but certainly not enough to convict the maid for Extortion, or espionage for that matter.

We know that this woman was lying about this rape

Uh, no. She was inconsistent about what rooms she did or did not enter before and after the sexual assault. All the evidence we have is consistent with what she described happening in the room with DSK. Lying about the context of a rape isn't the same thing as lying about a rape.

The problem is saying that if you're not 100% certain that DSK assulted Diallo, you have to be 100% certain that Diallo was actually a conartist who was attempting to frame him to wring some money out of the guy.

assuming that he had a remarkably short refractory period.

Well, it wouldn't be a problem for me. I can't speak for anyone else.
posted by delmoi at 3:22 AM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Do we know if he actually orgasmed twice? Maybe he got close, then she pulled away, then he forced her to finish. Or....I just deleted other ideas. It's not nice speculating. But I don't believe it's categorically empirically obvious that she was not possibly raped.
posted by taff at 3:26 AM on November 27, 2011

It would seem prudent, if you suspect you're being set up for a scandal, to not have a hurried sexual encounter with your maid, regardless of its consentuality.

Not so easy if your dick does most of your thinking.
posted by the noob at 4:02 AM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

-So, was he set up in the other situations where he has been accused of not being entirely interested in the consent of a woman as well?-

I don't think anyone believes that, no. Of course, if you were going to set someone up then you would surely take their actual proclivities into account.

For instance, if I wanted to try and discredit David Cameron I wouldn't try and make people believe that he had associations with ultra-right wing fascists in his youth, or that he was secretly a great supporter of the Monday Club. That would be quite in-credible, completely at odds with things that the public know or think they know about him. It might not be so hard to get people to believe that as a student he was in a car involved in a drunken hit and run as a driver or a passenger, whatever. People already know that he was part of a society of reckless hard-drinkers, and it seems possible that he might do some damn fool thing and keep it quiet or even hush up something criminal that a close friend had done.

On the other hand, that kind of story would be difficult to believe of the glacial and professorial President Obama. When people want to libel him, they imagine he's variously a secret foreign agent, or part of a detached socialist elite. If I wanted to set him up, I'd try to make it appear that he was briefly a member of some offshoot of the Fabian Society or some other gradualist democratic socialist movement. (again: to make it appear that he was a Stalinist hardliner wouldn't work, only total nuts would ever believe that and they believe it already.)

The key to a good political set-up is believability.

That being said, I find it hard to credit that someone set DSK up as part of a carefully planned operation.

There are a number of possible explanations for the evidence that don't reflect well on the people involved but don't add up to either conspiracy or rape.

1) After Ms. Diallo reported her encounter (consensual or not) to hotel management, *they* realised the political consequences and got to work making phone calls to try and exploit it for political advantage and that this explains the delay in calling the police.

2) Hotel management considered trying to hush the whole thing up early on before reaching someone more senior who told them to call the police right away.

3) She was raped, *and* she stole the phone which explains why she went to the other room and why she didn't mention it.

4) She lied about being raped for financial advantage, but not as part of a conspiracy. DSK's enemies used the story against him.

In the end, it was her connections to shady people that destroyed any hope of a successful prosecution. Many immigrants have such connections, and not because they're criminals, but because they have wide ranging family and social ties to other members of their respective Diaspora some of whom are less than upstanding people.
posted by atrazine at 4:02 AM on November 27, 2011 [8 favorites]

Taff, I totally agree that you can have rape without physical force. But that's not what she alleged! You can read a description of the alleged assault here. Note that it is very, very physical. And also note that the whole thing - her opening the door, him emerging from the bedroom, grabbing her breasts, slamming the door, pulling her in the bedroom, to the bed, out of the bedroom again, along the corridor, attempting to rape her vaginally and anally, and then raping her orally (according to the article cited in the FPP, twice) - took place in no more than seven minutes. DSK is 62.

Oh yes - and immediately after all this, within the seven minutes from the time she opened the door, DSK called his daughter to tell her he'd be late. I suppose he might have had the phone in his pocket, but would he really have called his daughter with his victim right there in front of him? So you have to allow time for her to stagger to her feet, run down the passageway, through the bedroom, open the door and escape. All in seven minutes or less.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:05 AM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Conspiracy or not, the conspiracy's aims have been achieved. DSK is ruined. His political career is finished. But he has lots of sympathy and supporters. Maybe his political star will rise again because of that. The case is ambiguous, as is the result. The best conspiracies are the ones that look like a collection of coincidences.
posted by chavenet at 4:07 AM on November 27, 2011

But it's not about whether we want him to be guilty or not. Rationally, let's be honest. In this case, Occam's Razor is a lot cleaner. What possibility requires the least theorizing and resolves the question in the simplest way? That DSK still has the phone, and disabled it himself, or that he dropped and lost it and it broke.

Then why would he:

a.) Call the hotel, asking about the phone he'd disabled or dropped and broke
b.) When they tell him they've found the phone, tell them where they can deliver it to?

Additionally, if he had just committed a rape in the hotel and was about to leave the country, this action makes no sense at all.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:18 AM on November 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

What possibility requires the least theorizing and resolves the question in the simplest way? That DSK still has the phone, and disabled it himself, or that he dropped and lost it and it broke.

False dichotomy, for one thing. The phone could also have been stolen.

IMO, PeterMcDermott successfully deals with your first possibility. As for the second, it's strikes me as extremely coincidental that DSK happens to lose the phone on that particular day.
posted by daveje at 4:33 AM on November 27, 2011

It is fairly clear to me (a Brit) that DSK was set up. Of course he had a bad reputation but nothing about what he is accused of sounds even faintly plausible unless you are predisposed to find him guilty, regardless of the charge.

My guess is that Diallo agreed to consensual sex for money and there was a dispute about money or value, or simply a crude attempt at blackmail "pay me more or I'll scream rape". DSK could have any hooker he wanted with a phone call, a homely room cleaner is hardly the type to provoke spontaneous rape. She did not have a gun or knife held against her, there are too many ways not to commit oral sex and get away. If oral sex happened then she did it because she wanted to, presumably for money.

People knew his reputation, they also knew that the US is the perfect place to frame a Frenchman: widespread anti-French bigotry, prudishness, the tabloid press and feminazism are a potent combination. The end result is that people wanting to manipulate French domestic politics used the US as a stooge and the Americans fell for it hook, line and sinker.

In the end, the charges were dropped because they were not plausible.
posted by epo at 4:50 AM on November 27, 2011

feminazism

I'm assuming this is satirical.
posted by Wolof at 4:56 AM on November 27, 2011 [6 favorites]

Of course he was set up. And he's a sleazebag. That's how he was so easy to set up.

Luckily, the DA Vance and Ray "Superbad Kelly" have caught a vewy dangewous lone wolf tewwowist this week, hiding in his mom's basement being an "Al Qaeda sympathizer" by reading websites and so milquetoast and stupid that the FBI wasn't even interested.

So both the signal failure to handle DSK right (or get to the bottom of it), and the brutal and offensive tactics taken to suppress OWS will be forgotten behind this heroic arrest.
posted by spitbull at 5:06 AM on November 27, 2011

Also, the rich and famous need a taxi to go 8 blocks in 30 minutes . . . ?
posted by spitbull at 5:13 AM on November 27, 2011

DSK could have any hooker he wanted with a phone call, a homely room cleaner is hardly the type to provoke spontaneous rape.

You really lost me here.
posted by theredpen at 5:14 AM on November 27, 2011 [12 favorites]

DSK could have any hooker he wanted with a phone call, a homely room cleaner is hardly the type to provoke spontaneous rape.

That's going to make people cringe. I'm sure that the "how could it be rape when she was ugly" defence is rather deprecated.

feminazism

If you use that kind of language the whole rest of the thread will be about it. Believing that he didn't rape her and being a feminist are not mutually exclusive, and I know I'm not the only one to resent implications to the contrary.
posted by atrazine at 5:18 AM on November 27, 2011 [7 favorites]

As for the second, it's strikes me as extremely coincidental that DSK happens to lose the phone on that particular day.

The encounter with the maid happens at 12.07. The phone is disabled at 12.51.

The Vatican determines beatification on events less miraculous than that.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:34 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Interesting article. I've been convinced he raped her, but the timing, her lies, and the three-minute dance are all really strange. Oh, and that other person in the room??
He is still a dick, though
posted by mumimor at 5:36 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

After being warned his BB may have been hacked he then uses the same phone to call his wife to discuss the hacking? If I have learned anything from thrillers it is that if your phone is compromised you then either use a pay phone (available in the lobby) or feign urgency and offer to pay five or ten dollars to someone (staff or guest) in the hotel to use their mobile phone and make the call safely without tipping anyone off.
posted by saucysault at 5:54 AM on November 27, 2011

Also, I notice the timing of six or seven minutes is being synchronized by two different timekeepers. I can't find two clocks in my house that tell the same time so she may have been their longer although her account relates a very brief, though brutal, assault.
posted by saucysault at 5:58 AM on November 27, 2011

In my experience, powerful people are often surprisingly careless. At some point, they get used to always having someone there ready to clean up the mess they make. But he may have deliberately talked about the hacking with his wife, in order to tell the hackers he was on to them.
posted by mumimor at 6:42 AM on November 27, 2011

I wonder what Banon's mother admitting that she had consensual sex with DSK does to the case!?

I don't get it. Why would the fact that he and the mother had consensual sex at some point affect whether or not he tried to stick his hand down the unwilling daughter's pants?

DSK could have any hooker he wanted with a phone call, a homely room cleaner is hardly the type to provoke spontaneous rape.

Provoked. Leaving aside the women-haters-club stuff going on in the rest of this comment, and the fact that there are perfectly attractive-looking rapists out there who go after elderly women in nursing homes, probably the major thing about her, if this is true, was that she was there right then when he wanted a blow job, that very second. If the other stories are true, he has very poor impulse control, sexually speaking, and behaves in ways that suggest that he might be getting off on humiliating women who have less power than he does. It's not crazy to think that the fact that she was an actual maid rather than a professional sex worker might have had a certain appeal for him.

Besides which, the issue is whether the act was consensual or not, not whether or not it happened. We know the "homely room cleaner" gave him a blow job, whether he made her do it or not.
posted by Adventurer at 6:57 AM on November 27, 2011 [9 favorites]

"DSK could have any hooker he wanted with a phone call, a homely room cleaner is hardly the type to provoke spontaneous rape."

This exact sentiment repeats itself every time someone famous or rich is accused of rape and I think it is worth looking at, if only because it has implications that go far beyond this case. What it does is it projects the speakers sexuality onto the accused and assumes him to be acting with both the benefit of hindsight and with the same sexual interests.

To say that no one with access to a sex worker at a moments notice could possibly rape to demonstrate a naive ignorance of what the act is; rape is primarily the imposition is violence rather than the theft of sex. It is about so much more than sex. I would argue that someone with the money to trivially access to a sex worker is more likely rape than someone who doesn't for all of the same reasons why the rich shoplift at higher rates than the poor. A powerful man with constantly stoked feelings of entitlement, rage he doesn't need to examine, and a perverse sense of persecution who has grown accustomed to dismissing the feelings of others is a perfect storm of rapiness.

I'm going to assume that the sentence construction of that second clause that describes rape survivors as having the final agency behind, much less provoking, their rapes is an unfortunate accident of writing; because that is so very deeply not cool. Rape is by definition imposed and the result of the perpetrators actions, not the survivors. Beyond that though, the idea that homely people cannot be raped is also very common and very wrong. Attractive people are raped at near identical levels to unattractive people, just about the only trait that is powerfully predictive of rape is the visible likelihood that the victim will be be able to fight back, either during the act or legally/socially/violently afterwards. Rape is most typically a cowardly and craven act.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:15 AM on November 27, 2011 [16 favorites]

The maid lied about a previous sex assault:
"So the gang rape was not a piece of her history, not even a fictitious piece adopted for the sake of the asylum application. Whatever logic, if any, drove her to recount it to the district attorney’s staff, they could see it only as a stunning demonstration of her ability to weep over a sexual assault that had never taken place, and then to quickly pile another falsehood on top of it."
Remember - that's why the DA dropped the case.

If DSK's veracity is in doubt, so is hers. If she lied, which seems likely to me, we have to ask why?

Cui bono?
posted by dash_slot- at 7:25 AM on November 27, 2011

The whole story is a mess. What I find most fascinating about it is no one disputes that Strauss-Kahn got a blow job from the maid. Even if it was 100% a setup, the man still chose to get a (very) quick blow job from a maid at a hotel before meeting his daughter for lunch. That's an extraordinary risk for a man in his position of power to take.

Strauss-Kahn's story reminds me of Larry Craig or Mark Foley, other men with significant political power who just can't keep it in their pants. Who take terrible risks with their whole lives for just a few minutes of sleazy sexual pleasure. It's pretty astonishing.
posted by Nelson at 7:32 AM on November 27, 2011 [6 favorites]

Is it possible to believe in a rape culture and believe this woman is most likely lying?
posted by PissOnYourParade at 7:51 AM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Ironically, the conspiracy theory is more credible now than it was at the time of the Diallo affair. This latter case seemed to be about a womanizer unable to control his sex drive. The bizarre tangle of lies Diallo told Cyrus Vance destroyed her case but it was still a she-said-he-said story. The Banon story developed along similar lines: she claimed he was aggressive, he claimed he wasn't. There was little fodder for conspiracy there.

However, it's what emerged when DSK came back to France that shaked his most fervent supporters, who have all gone underground by now. Basically, it turns out that he was living a double life, one as a politician/IMF boss, the other as a prominent member of a tight network of people - police chiefs, businessmen, pimps, madams - that toured European sex clubs in company of escorts. The stuff leaking from the current police investigation about the Carlton Hotel is quite incredible: a madam complaining to her boyfriend (DSK's favourite pimp, nicknamed "Dodo The Brine") about having been sodomized by DSK in the restroom of a plush Parisian restaurant, DSK telling a cop buddy he'll help him once he becomes president while both men are busy double-teaming a prostitute (all this caught on tape), DSK taking escorts on a tour of the IMF headquarters etc. It's a much bigger story than the Diallo case, because of the number of people involved and of the potential corruption angle (the crooked businessmen + cops + politicians trifecta). And of course, considering that the police higher-ups (and their politician masters) have been knowing all of this for a while, it made DSK a much easier target for a trap.

The scenario would work like this: conspirators in Paris would ask for a favour from their ex-cop friend working for the NY Sofitel, who would happen to know an immigrant maid with dubious associates and money problems. Threaten her with deportation, tell her to approach DSK as a goodwill gift from Dodo The Brine. Hook, line, sinker. That would explain a few things that still make little sense: Diallo's lies, DSK assaulting a chambermaid apparently at random. Diallo could still be a rape victim: DSK is known now to be a little too rough. The conspiracy scenario is far-fetched for sure, but no longer unrealistic.

In 2006, a high-ranking member of Sarkozy's party made some off-the-cuff remarks to reporters claiming that DSK's presidential bid wouldn't last a week because "we have pictures, we'll make them public and the French won't like them". People didn't know what to make of that at the time, but considering the recent developments it's impossible not to read this as an indication that people close to Sarkozy knew all along (from highly confidential police sources) what was actually going on with DSK, i.e. not just the womanizing he was known for (and not considered problematic by the French), but something much darker.

The main objection to a conspiracy theory is that it was not really needed: the Carlton Hotel story was going to be exposed and would destroy DSK anyway. The Diallo story broke too soon: if it had blown up a few weeks later, after DSK's probable win in his party's primaries, the impact would have been even much higher and more beneficial to potential conspirators. As it stands, the Diallo story prevented DSK from winning the primaries... and possibly Sarkozy from winning the presidency next year. As some people said, the French should raise a statue to Nafi Diallo...
posted by elgilito at 7:51 AM on November 27, 2011 [23 favorites]

elgilito: I haven't followed the story so closely. Are there English language articles about the Carlton Hotel story?
posted by Nelson at 7:57 AM on November 27, 2011

I could never be a defense attorney if for no other reason than it involves defending someone like DSK.
posted by tommasz at 7:58 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

I thought this was a set-up from the instant I heard the story -- but the fact that people who agree with me consider "prudishness" and "feminazism" salient American traits has me worried.
posted by B-Boy Limping at 8:10 AM on November 27, 2011 [7 favorites]

Are there English language articles about the Carlton Hotel story?
Skeptic provided one above (with caveats). This one from MSNBC is not bad, though 2-week old. Most of the juicy stuff is in French, unfortunately (and sometimes hard to find due to France's strict libel laws).
posted by elgilito at 8:14 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Maybe she was raped, maybe not. But it is gross to see this frosted with statements in this thread such as:

1. She was ugly, therefore she wasn't raped.
2. Feminazis (dude who said this -- just don't, even if you are joking)
3. She did bad things in the past, this is further proof that she wasn't raped. Or, maybe what the real sense of this is: Bad Women don't get to accuse their rapists because they lost that right when they were the Whore of the Madonna/Whore equation.
4. She was tall and therefore could have fought him off and therefore she wasn't raped.

I love metafilter, but dudes. Come on.
posted by angrycat at 8:35 AM on November 27, 2011 [24 favorites]

Just going to throw out there that Occam's Razor probably should't ever be used in matters pertaining to international politics. For a political figurehead such as DSK, a wide-ranging, well-organized international conspiracy is entirely plausible, and if anything, should be one of the first possibilities investigated.

Also, suppose the maid was somehow cajoled, blackmailed, or threatened into having sex with DSK by some third party. Does that count as rape? If so, who's the guilty party?
posted by schmod at 8:35 AM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Strauss-Kahn's story reminds me of Larry Craig or Mark Foley, other men with significant political power who just can't keep it in their pants. Who take terrible risks with their whole lives for just a few minutes of sleazy sexual pleasure. It's pretty astonishing.

It's really not that astonishing. The urge to reproduce is a primal thing. The will to accumulate money and power might well be nothing more than the will to attract more mates. The fact that, as humans, we're sometimes able to put it to one side for a while, in order to pursue other objectives is what astonishes me. The fact that many men will poke it into any available orifice, regardless of the risks involved is something I just regard as a given.

As Valerie Solanas once put it, 'Men will wade nostril deep through a river of shit for a sniff of pussy.' Rich and powerful men are no different.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:36 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

It's really not that astonishing

It sure is to me. I have a sex drive too, but it's not like I have some Pon farr shit that compels me to have really stupid, random sex with inappropriate people. One part of being an adult is controlling your urges and acting in a socially acceptable manner.

I guess part of the problem is that for Strauss-Kahn, prostitute orgies and chambermaid blow-jobs just were socially acceptable. Also in a weird way for Larry Craig, tearoom sex happens in a little subsociety where it's accepted to have sex in a public men's room. I really can't get Mark Foley, though, there's no world where what he did is socially acceptable.
posted by Nelson at 8:46 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Strauss-Kahn's story reminds me of Larry Craig or Mark Foley, other men with significant political power who just can't keep it in their pants.

Larry Craig was never accused of raping anyone, was he? Neither was Foley. I'd be careful with certain equivalencies that are getting tossed around a lot lately.
posted by spitbull at 8:46 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

While we're hypothesising, it's worth restating the nub of elgilito's excellent comment: it's quite plausible that DSK was set up and that he assaulted Diallo.
posted by motty at 8:56 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well, MeFi, is international. Let rip with the French articles. I am curious and would like to read reliable sources.
posted by jadepearl at 9:39 AM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

I guess part of the problem is that for Strauss-Kahn, prostitute orgies and chambermaid blow-jobs just were socially acceptable.
This

I once had a job at a university, where just about all of the non-gay senior professors would harass, abuse, assault and rape female students and secretaries at random. They had a game going on about who could "get" all the secretaries. They would "trade" students, when they didn't have cash to pay for activities such as guest lecturers. Within the first month of my job, a student approached me about a rape incident, and I naturally thought she was asking for my help in calling the police. But she only wanted a shoulder to cry on, since she was certain she would never get a degree if she reported it. Which was probably correct, since it would be hard for her to find a professor who wasn't in on the game. (Obviously, this place tried to avoid female professors like poison).
In the beginning, I fought the system, but in the end I left. The charade ended several years later when a group of students went to the dean together (still not the police), and most of the professors were stowed away into jobs where they had no access to women (not jail, where they belonged). I hope this type of men will die out eventually.

Some useful knowledge I acquired back then: if you are cornered by one of these guys, you need to go for their weakest spot: their vanity. Laugh at them, ridicule them. Remind them they are neither sexy nor terrifying. This usually gets them thinking. If that doesn't work, offer some real resistance. They have watched too much porn and think NO and trying to escape are just cute signs of your sweet innocence. You need to punch them in the face and kick them in the groin. They are rapists, and thus cowardly and criminal. Remind them of that. (This advice only applies to this type of aggressors. Unfortunately, you need to know which type of evil you are confronting).

At the time of the case, I didn't read the articles, because I was convinced Strauss-Kahn belonged to this type and was guilty. Now when I read the linked material, I am even more convinced of his bad character, but parts of Diallo's story go against the experience I've described above. That said, she may have exaggerated because she (rightly) didn't think the real experience (of consensual sex overstepping boundaries) would be seen as rape. He was set up, and so was she..
posted by mumimor at 9:40 AM on November 27, 2011 [4 favorites]

Is it possible to believe in a rape culture and believe this woman is most likely lying?

You are referring to lying about consent since they have both agreed that they did have sex. I wonder what would be her motivation for agreeing to have sex with him, knowing a consensual sex act during work hours (regardless of whether it was commercial or not - and a BJ would probably only pay a few hundred at most) would cause her to lose a job that paid her $25 an hour + benefits and tips, when she was not qualified to pursue any other type of work except perhaps retail. If she was being paid off it would have to be a significant sum of money and it would have to be well hidden - her financial acumen has not been shown in the past and I am sure her life and finances have been extensively investigated. A white virgin would have a hard time winning a settlement after recanting consent after a BJ, I do not understand why anyone would think she was setting DSK up herself without first making sure she had appropriate multiple bruises that could be shown to the media. I think a planned set up would have been a lot more "neat" with a more socially acceptable victim. If she had consented to the BJ and then demanded blackmail money to avoid crying rape I can't see that being a short conversation.
posted by saucysault at 9:50 AM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

If it was a setup, the goal wouldn't have been to convict him of rape, only to get him out of the running for the presidency.
posted by empath at 9:54 AM on November 27, 2011

Also, I notice the timing of six or seven minutes is being synchronized by two different timekeepers.

Eh, at first I thought so as well, but one is the hotel keycard system and the other is the Blackberry network - both are probably synchronized by NTP (or something fancier) and accurate to the minute.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:59 AM on November 27, 2011

Responses from Sofitel owners and Diallo lawyers and others to the NYRB article
posted by Anything at 10:06 AM on November 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

There, 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.

I'd love to see that footage; the bias in the article is obvious and I prefer to make my own judgements. Obviously the writer assumes they are celebrating the police being called because a "set up" was going down as planned. Or maybe they were really happy that a co-worker/friend who had been assaulted was being taken seriously and the authorities were finally getting involved after they had plead with their superiors for an hour to turn the investigation over to the police.

On preview:
Accor said in a statement that the three minute dance of celebration “in fact lasted eight seconds, with both employees filmed on CCTV categorically denying that their exchange had any connection whatsoever with Mr Strauss-Kahn”.
posted by saucysault at 10:13 AM on November 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

Joe in Australia: "Oh yes - and immediately after all this, within the seven minutes from the time she opened the door, DSK called his daughter to tell her he'd be late. I suppose he might have had the phone in his pocket, but would he really have called his daughter with his victim right there in front of him?"

I just wanted to say: this bit has been bothering me. To be blunt, yes, he would have called his daughter with the victim right there in front of him. This is consistent with everything we know about how rapists behave. Moreover, it's consistent with her story, which claims the forced oral sex happened two separate times.

These kinds of assumptions - "well, he may have been a rapist, but surely even a rapist wouldn't be that indecent, right?" - have historically proven time and time again to be wrong. Yes, rapists stand over their victims and feign nonchalance while making scheduling calls. This is not outside the realm of reason; in fact, it is completely understandable, because this kind of thing can often be intended as a display of power.

If we drop the assumption that the encounter must have ended at the time the phone call happened, then that stretches the length of the possible encounter to 20 minutes. I believe it could have happened in seven, but twenty minutes does seem a more reasonable time frame.
posted by koeselitz at 10:44 AM on November 27, 2011 [7 favorites]

Even if it was 100% a setup, the man still chose to get a (very) quick blow job from a maid at a hotel before meeting his daughter for lunch. That's an extraordinary risk for a man in his position of power to take.

Well, remember that if it had been consensual and it had come out it still wouldn't have damaged his political career.
posted by atrazine at 10:52 AM on November 27, 2011

From that Telegraph followup article

Meanwhile, one of Miss Diallo’s lawyers said that she was not savvy enough to have been part of a complex plot by the French government.
“You have to know Miss Diallo to know how absurd this is,” Douglas Wigdor told The Daily Telegraph. “She is a very unsophisticated woman. To say she is part of a political conspiracy is ridiculous”.

one friend said ... “The suggestion that Sarkozy needed to recruit a simple African maid to bring him down is crazy”.

I don't even know who is arguing what side anymore, but it's clear Ms. Diallo (excuse me, "Miss Diallo") is suffering from her lack of powerful press agents.
posted by Nelson at 11:16 AM on November 27, 2011

The most puzzling thing for me is why Sofitel didn't want to divulge the occupant of room 2820. I don't know if a rape happened or not, but the hotel is hiding something.
posted by ymgve at 12:02 PM on November 27, 2011

wait, mumimor, you're saying a university took an entire department of tenured professors, almost all of whom were harassers at best, rapists at worst, and put them all into jobs where they would have no contact with women? Doing what?

Was this in 1965?

Sounds just a bit hyperbolized to me.
posted by spitbull at 12:08 PM on November 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

elgilito: "...crooked businessmen + cops + politicians trifecta."

Maybe it's just semantics... Is it necessary to mention that the businessmen are crooked? All things being equal, are politicians and cops usually/always on the "Yes" side of the crooked/not crooked divide? Are businessmen usually/always on the "No" side? Just curious.
posted by sneebler at 12:15 PM on November 27, 2011

wait, mumimor, you're saying a university took an entire department of tenured professors, almost all of whom were harassers at best, rapists at worst, and put them all into jobs where they would have no contact with women? Doing what?

Was this in 1965?

Sounds just a bit hyperbolized to me.

It was during the -90's. But not in America.
They got "full-research"-appointments, and were allowed to "work at home". As stated, they were already senior, and the cost of keeping them on till pension-age wasn't as bad as a major scandal and court-cases about each of them.

But I understand your doubts - I didn't believe it either, till I saw it with my own eyes.
posted by mumimor at 12:41 PM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Is it necessary to mention that the businessmen are crooked?
The people indicted so far are all businessmen except for one cop. DSK himself is only a witness in the investigation and not (yet) a suspect. Now why were those business people so interested in providing escorts and organising orgies for those cops and politicians is a good question.
posted by elgilito at 1:12 PM on November 27, 2011

Sounds just a bit hyperbolized to me.

It is sometimes astonishing what you can actually get away with in academia. Not kidding here: I knew a department in a fairly prestigious UK university with a senior department member who used to oil himself up and then smear himself against the walls in common areas while naked during the slow hours of the evening. (He also used to leave his dirty underwear in the common lounge.) Admittedly it's not rape, but it's hard to think of another line of work that would put up with this for over 3 years before taking action, even though this was reported by a number of female staff.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 1:16 PM on November 27, 2011

Oh I know stories upon stories of strange behavior in academia, don't get me wrong. But I'm not surprised this story is outside the US. For one thing, there are very few fields where you'd find a senior faculty made up entirely of men in any major department these days. And the old culture of entitlement from the days when American academia was a relative boys' club (as some zones of European academia still are) are long gone.
posted by spitbull at 1:54 PM on November 27, 2011

Ymgve wrote: The most puzzling thing for me is why Sofitel didn't want to divulge the occupant of room 2820. I don't know if a rape happened or not, but the hotel is hiding something.

According to this article they say the room was vacant. I presume the former occupant wouldn't want to be dragged into the papers just so that he could deny being an accomplice to a weird conspiracy. And I'm sure the hotel and the hotel staff and DSK and everybody else are hiding things - but it's probably just embarrassing details like "why did it take an hour to call the police?" The answer to questions like that is usually "Yeah, we should do things better next time."
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:01 PM on November 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Can you imagine being the person who'd occupied that other room in all innocence (assuming that is the case)? The media would tear you apart like starving voles and for the rest of your life the Internet records you in association with this incident.

It is bad enough that everyone who knows people associated with an event are ruthlessly investigated by every media outlet under the sun. Adding people who are simply in proximity to events to the list of people thrown to the news wolves is horrifying. It is gross that the fifteen minutes of fame for some people is coming down to being near things.
posted by winna at 2:26 PM on November 27, 2011

The most puzzling thing for me is why Sofitel didn't want to divulge the occupant of room 2820.
It's where they keep the secret owls.
posted by rongorongo at 3:21 PM on November 27, 2011

"Oh I know stories upon stories of strange behavior in academia, don't get me wrong. But I'm not surprised this story is outside the US. For one thing, there are very few fields where you'd find a senior faculty made up entirely of men in any major department these days. And the old culture of entitlement from the days when American academia was a relative boys' club (as some zones of European academia still are) are long gone."

Not to feed the derail or anything, but as a young academic I can tell you that they are going, but they arn't anything like gone yet. We had that thread here if you missed it
posted by Blasdelb at 3:31 PM on November 27, 2011

He was set up, and it's not anti-woman or anti-feminist to say it. There are lots and lots of real rapes happening every single day. This was not one of them.

I don't have a problem with the basic facts of the case. The idea that Strauss-Kahn was too rich or smart to rape someone is ridiculous -- we only need to look at Clinton for someone who was profoundly stupid when it came to getting laid discreetly. It turns out that hotel maids are raped by businessmen on a shockingly regular basis, so that part's sound. And, while Diallo did lie about getting raped in the past, that's a common way to get into the country and doesn't say a lot about her character.

It's the details that are way too suspicious -- the warnings from French diplomats, the empty room, the lost Blackberry, the security guards. The fact that Diallo speaks French! And the extreme swiftness with which the prosecutors made everything public, and the media's wall-to-wall coverage of a guy most Americans had never heard of.

It's a GOOD THING that rape of a poor black woman is now regarded as such as serious crime that diplomats frame each other for it (rather than the more traditional rape of an upper-class white subordinate). Of course there was a little bit of the "she must be a slut" going around, but amazingly little. Even 10 years ago this story wouldn't have made the nightly news because the perpetrator isn't famous enough, or the victim isn't pretty/innocent enough.
posted by miyabo at 6:17 PM on November 27, 2011

Thank you, Miyabo, for clearing up what a group of lawyers, police and others can't decide. We can now all go home.

I'm not saying it wasn't a set up, but relying on a agenda-driven factually erroneous piece, and a host of dubious aspersions so common in relation to rape victims as to be cliche (woman didn't fight back; woman lied in the past, must have lied about this, etc etc) is hardly the decisive blow.
posted by smoke at 6:24 PM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

(For the record I think DSK is scum and should have been fired years ago -- but for several well-proven sexual assault allegations, not for an unproven rape allegation.)
posted by miyabo at 7:24 PM on November 27, 2011

Not that this helps, but I seem to recall that she was attractive, and not at all homely.

Also curiously unmentioned in this article was the late translation of the phone call made to a relative... that was central to the prosecution's dismissal.

"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.' "

That translation was countered as being incorrect here.

...

What a mess. I was pretty amused by all the french who were shocked that in the US we would handcuff someone and frogmarch them off a plane, like they were some kind of monster or something. Weeeell, as it turns out...
posted by stratastar at 8:13 PM on November 27, 2011

Smoke wrote: a host of dubious aspersions so common in relation to rape victims as to be cliche (woman didn't fight back; woman lied in the past, must have lied about this, etc etc)

I don't think anyone says she was raped but didn't fight back. In fact her story would be a lot more credible if that's what she had said. I think most people today would readily acknowledge that sex between a hotel maid and a wealthy tourist is probably either (a) commercial; or (b) nonconsensual - and neither of them claim it was commercial.

Part of the problem with her account is that she has a long story about him fighting her and dragging her around the place, which doesn't really fit into the short time frame available. And it was a short time frame - because both parties agree that DSK was naked (after showering) at the time it took place. So even assuming that DSK would call his daughter after (while?) violently raping a woman, he still needed to get dressed and collect his things, summon the elevator, ride downstairs, possibly check out, and leave the lobby. The call took place at 12:13, so he had fifteen minutes to do all that. Yes, I suppose you could compress it into less than fifteen minutes - but it's getting a bit ridiculous; he had no idea that the timing would be an issue and therefore he had no reason to compress the time. The prosecution didn't drop this case because of sexism or old-fashioned views about rape; many people said that they treated DSK outrageously, given that he is presumed to be innocent. It was only after the evidence started coming in that they backed away.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:00 PM on November 27, 2011

What a mess. I was pretty amused by all the french who were shocked that in the US we would handcuff someone and frogmarch them off a plane, like they were some kind of monster or something.

Not ALL the French. DSK has (had, rather) many influential friends who complained. But many others were far less bothered.

However, I do think that it is justified to criticise the practice of submitting a suspect, any suspect, to a "walk of shame" in front of the cameras, as a huge violation of the presumption of innocence which is supposed to be the cornerstone of criminal justice in Western societies since Roman law. The suspect is being punished, in a sometimes lifechanging manner, before any judgment or even a court hearing. That such pre-judicial punishment has become so commonplace in America is a pretty damning flaw of the US judiciary.
posted by Skeptic at 5:21 AM on November 28, 2011

Not to feed the derail or anything, but as a young academic I can tell you that they are going, but they arn't anything like gone yet. We had that thread here if you missed it

As an old academic, I assure you they are on the ropes. You should have seen it 20 years ago.
posted by spitbull at 5:28 AM on November 28, 2011

Also, are we really so sure DSK *isn't* into being handcuffed and frog-marched? He seems to be into everything else!
posted by spitbull at 5:28 AM on November 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

[lying about getting raped is] a common way to get into the country and doesn't say a lot about her character.

The final claim does not follow from the first one. Indeed it does speak to her character, and it harms the chances for asylum of actual rape victims if lying about it is so common that such claims are routinely discounted.
posted by spitbull at 5:32 AM on November 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

miyabo: “It's the details that are way too suspicious -- the warnings from French diplomats...”

This is another thing that bothers me about this whole story: the whole claim that DSK received warnings from friends. How do we know this? From uncredited reports? I would guess we know this largely from DSK himself and from what his lawyers have chosen to say to the press. But, first of all, is this claim at all credible? How easy would it be for him to say: "friends have warned me that people are going to frame me!" And, second of all, this need not even have been a lie, really, rather than a slight stretching of a truth: these words – 'your enemies are likely to look for excuses to damage you publicly!' – are on the lips of every intelligent PR person in the world, are they not? It's common advice. I'm sure there's not a major world leader or diplomat who doesn't hear this time and time again from advisors and friends.

The true test is what happened once this whole thing blew up. If DSK really had a "friend" with secret knowledge of plots against him, that "friend" has long since disappeared; it would seem to be in everybody's best interest (especially DSK's) to reveal the friend or at least interview them privately to discover more about the supposed conspiracy. But none of this has happened. DSK has offered nothing but vague implications that "someone" is out to get him.

Finally, many people look at this and say: "there are just too many suspicious details! I can't believe it was a simple rape." The mistake here is the assumption that usually there are no suspicious details, that most everyday occurrences are simple and mundane. This isn't so. Every crime is surrounded by suspicious details and apparent hints at the possibility of some grand conspiracy. This is just how life is: it's always more particular and more peculiar than one would expect. A recent short film by Errol Morris demonstrated this perfectly; details you'd think couldn't possibly have a rational explanation often do.

A man with a black umbrella on a sunny day at the exact site where a president was assassinated is a much, much more sinister-seeming and odd coincidence than the fact that a maid speaks French, the fact that a man lost his cell phone, the fact that a hotel room was empty. There are completely plausible explanations for all of these things that leap to mind immediately. (For one thing, as someone who once worked in hotels, if I experienced something traumatic, the first thing I'd probably do is go to an unoccupied room that was comfortable to me, so it's not surprising in the least that Diallo would do that, too. Hotel staff are not immune to the human desire to sometimes lock a door behind you and be alone.)

In short: there is about as much evidence that DSK was set up by an international conspiracy as there is evidence that Kennedy was assassinated by the KGB. There are odd coincidences – Lee Harvey Oswald defected to Moscow for three years! – but testimony of KGB witnesses and KGB records that were later unsealed are pretty clear on the fact that nobody in the KGB – indeed, no important Soviet official of any kind – actually contacted Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in Russia. It really was just a coincidence.
posted by koeselitz at 2:30 PM on November 28, 2011 [4 favorites]

Some people seem to be investing a lot of energy into arguing for DSK's guilt.

But these things are inarguable:

-- The maid's general character is in the gutter, with demonstrable links to organized crime ($100,000 in deposits from gang members/drug dealers/felons into her bank account over the last two years).
-- Her credibility is very poor. She's on record filing a bogus/fraudulent rape charge.
-- She lied about what happened immediately after the rape (claimed she didn't go into any other rooms when it was proved that she did).

And on top of the inarguable things, there's the fact that she was on tape telling her incarcerated felon boyfriend something to the effect of "don't worry, he has a lot of money, I know what I'm doing." (I read a NYT article that says her attorneys dispute that translation so I'm not including it among the inarguable things).

This is a woman with terrible character, no credibility in accusations of rape, who has lied about the very circumstances of THIS situation.

In the face of all that, it's puzzling why there are so many people clinging desperately to any possibility that DSK still may have done it. Why?
posted by jayder at 3:02 PM on November 28, 2011

jayder, even though I've been convinced that Strauss-Kahn was set up in this case, I believe criminals can get raped, and are as entitled to a fair treatment as everyone else, if they are raped.
posted by mumimor at 3:44 PM on November 28, 2011

Is anyone here arguing against Diallo being treated fairly?
posted by jayder at 4:28 PM on November 28, 2011

ummm, maybe. Character arguments in rape cases are edgy, in my opinion. What convinced me was the timeline.
posted by mumimor at 4:44 PM on November 28, 2011

Rape victims get the fun of getting their supposed sluttiness paraded in court; hence, any questioning of a rape victim's character is going to be so motherfucking loaded. But then you have the important question of the credibility of the witness. I get why people want to go to her character, but going to that place means also dealing with the historical context which can be boiled down to: Aw, come on man, she was asking for it.
posted by angrycat at 4:49 PM on November 28, 2011

jayder, you're moving the goalposts. This is a thread about the possibility that DSK was set up. There is absolutely no evidence that he was, and in fact the case that he was is laughable in my opinion.

jayder: “This is a woman with terrible character, no credibility in accusations of rape, who has lied about the very circumstances of THIS situation.”

All of those things are circumstantial and in fact have simple explanations. You may dismiss the possibility that those explanations are correct, but we have to take them into account. In particular, as I and others have said, rape victims are usually confused and forget what happens after their attack. This doesn't make her a liar, particularly since the untruth didn't at all enter into the facts of the case.

“And on top of the inarguable things, there's the fact that she was on tape telling her incarcerated felon boyfriend something to the effect of "don't worry, he has a lot of money, I know what I'm doing." (I read a NYT article that says her attorneys dispute that translation so I'm not including it among the inarguable things).”

The translation wasn't precisely wrong. The thing that was wrong was that it was her boyfriend who mentioned money on the call. Diallo's lawyer said this publicly after hearing the tape, and the DA confirmed it.

“In the face of all that, it's puzzling why there are so many people clinging desperately to any possibility that DSK still may have done it. Why?”

It seems clear, given the dearth of evidence to the contrary, that there was no conspiracy to frame DSK. If there was no conspiracy, then all this circumstantial stuff – he was warned by friends! Diallo had past mob connections! &c – mean between little and nothing in this case.

When you accept that (a) she had absolutely no reason whatsoever to report this if it weren't true; and (b) the timing and events jive perfectly with her story about the essential details in the case (for instance, she claimed this rape came in two waves, whereas he clearly made a phone call in the middle of the time in which it would have occurred) – then it becomes a lot more likely that rape is indeed what occurred.
posted by koeselitz at 4:58 PM on November 28, 2011 [3 favorites]

jayder wrote: it's puzzling why there are so many people clinging desperately to any possibility that DSK still may have done it. Why?

I argued for DSK's innocence; now I'll argue for his guilt.

It's undisputed that a sexual act took place. Hotel maids don't usually have romantic quickies with the guests but neither party claims that it was a commercial transaction. The act was brief (probably no more than six minutes) and DSK left the hotel immediately afterwards. If this wasn't rape, what was it?

Then, too, why would Diallo falsely accuse him? She must have known that a disproven claim of rape would put her pleasant, well-paid job at risk. Was it some sort of attempted blackmail? But why choose a guest who is leaving in a few minutes rather than one who will stay around for negotiations? And why report a rape after the guest has left, when any attempt has clearly failed? Surely it would make more sense to pick a different guest and try again.

And coming back to the first question - why did the sex take place? DSK hasn't spoken; what rationale could he have given? Are we to believe that his charm and good looks won over the chambermaid? Or that a hotel maid from West Africa was the point of a conspiratorial dagger aimed at his reputation?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:02 PM on November 28, 2011 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile, while no "friend" of DSK's has come forward to admit warning him about a "plot" against him, at least one of his friends has come forward to say that he thinks the conspiracy theories are nonsense.
posted by koeselitz at 8:28 AM on November 29, 2011

but neither party claims that it was a commercial transaction.

You don't think the fact that this would be admission of guilt to a felony has anything to do with it?
posted by Justinian at 12:42 AM on November 30, 2011

Surely it's better to be a whoremonger than a rapist.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:15 AM on November 30, 2011

Sure, but I don't think it would actually help his case in that regard. It would just make him look even worse in many people's eyes.
posted by Justinian at 12:18 PM on November 30, 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn hotel surveillance videos shown on French TV
posted by Anything at 12:48 PM on December 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

That was certainly not a three minute dance.
posted by ymgve at 7:40 PM on December 9, 2011

It is certainly suspicious that the gentlemen do not remember the reason for the "danse de joie." If I had danced for joy, hugging the other person delightedly, in the middle of a momentous rape investigation involving a public figure -- I would remember why I was dancing.

I think it's pretty clear that the dance is a strong indication that this rape allegation was not on the level.

And I'm surprised that so many people think that a set-up is an unlikely scenario in the context of a national political figure. It is not at all unlikely, where a leftist presidential candidate is concerned, and the fortunes of corporations are at stake, that a plan would be put in motion to disable that candidate by the parties who stand to lose by that candidate's ascent.
posted by jayder at 8:19 AM on December 10, 2011

t is certainly suspicious that the gentlemen do not remember the reason for the "danse de joie."

People (*) don't always act for unclouded motives, and they may place personal significance on things that you find relatively trivial. They may have thought an awkward and unpleasant housekeeper was going to be shown up as a liar. They may have thought a rude and over-demanding guest would be shown up as a rapist. They may have won a small prize in a work lottery and not told their fellow employees about it. They may have been told that a despised fellow employee had been denied a promotion. There are all sorts of ultimately boring answers that don't lead to the conclusion that the staff of a hotel have been secretly recruited to bring about the downfall of a future Presidential candidate.

(*) Well, other people.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:48 PM on December 10, 2011

At 1:33, Adrian Branch (spelling and name unclear in the video) calls the police. (Police call) After the police phone call, the two men Adrian Branch and Brian Yearwood, are found in another location alone. They talk, and suddenly, they explode in joy. They fall in each others arms, one is picked up, (One of them) does a dance.

An American journalist has indicated that this was a dance of joy lasting 3 minutes. The management of Sofitel has said that it actually only lasted 8 seconds. This scene, in reality, seems to only show 2 seconds that shows directly the two agents. The hotel management announced that the agents were celebrating sport results. No important sports game were finished at this time.

So much for the "dance of joy" bullshit.
posted by delmoi at 3:21 PM on December 13, 2011

-- The maid's general character is in the gutter, with demonstrable links to organized crime ($100,000 in deposits from gang members/drug dealers/felons into her bank account over the last two years).

This has no baring on whether or not DSK would want to rape her. People with disreputable associations can still be raped.

-- Her credibility is very poor. She's on record filing a bogus/fraudulent rape charge.<>

Uh, no. She said she had been raped in her home country, but that didn't appear on her asylum claim. She's never accused a specific person of rape before this.

-- She lied about what happened immediately after the rape (claimed she didn't go into any other rooms when it was proved that she did).

Which could easily be a mistake and has nothing to do with the facts of the case.

There's also the whole fact that other women have accused him of the same thing.
posted by delmoi at 3:30 PM on December 13, 2011