From today's NYT:
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.
Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.
Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.
Senior prosecutors met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn on Thursday and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.
Here's the beginning of my May 19th posting kicking around the DSK charges:
Is there enough evidence to convict Dominique Strauss-Kahn in court? I can't tell. Maybe on Friday at the Grand Jury hearing more will be revealed. I expected there to be more by now, though.
From the outside, we have what looks like a He Said She Said case. The accuser is being kept anonymous, while the accused is the head of the International Monetary Fund. So, this being 2011, we naturally believe the accuser on the grounds that an anonymous person is likely more reliable than a famous international financial expert.
In the case of this particular international financial expert, moreover, we have a long chain of rumors about him abusing women under his influence. DSK is an expert at misusing influence. On the other hand, a maid with a vacuum cleaner isn't somebody who thinks that maybe if she gives in to his advances, she'll get put in charge of the Portugal bailout.
What facts have been revealed might be consistent with a variety of scenarios, none of which would reflect well on DSK. But not all of them would be consistent with outright stranger rape. For example, say he lays a few Benjamin Franklins on the table. Needing cash, the maid accepts them. A few minutes later, out in the corridor, she runs into her boss, who asks why her lipstick is a mess. Panicking about losing her job, she makes up a story about a naked presidential candidate jumping her and forcing her to make a mess of her lipstick.
Well, maybe. And, keep in mind, that's probably the scenario that makes DSK look best (short of a gigantic movie-style conspiracy), which isn't very good.
You know, as we saw with the Duke lacrosse case, on a personal level, it's generally a good idea to stay away from strippers and hookers. Yeah, it's unfair when they make up accusations against you, but, you're safest from phony rape charges when they haven't ever met you.
On a national level, it's generally not a good idea to let in to your country foreigners like this lady who seem only skilled at working the system. From today's NYT:
On a national level, it's generally not a good idea to let in to your country foreigners like this lady who seem only skilled at working the system. From today's NYT:
“It is a mess, a mess on both sides,” one official said.
According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.
That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.
The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.
In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.
Will they kick her out?
This is not going down in the history books as an impressive performance by either the prestige or tabloid presses. Back in May, there quickly emerged questions about why this woman was living in an apartment building for AIDS sufferers (I read it in the Daily Telegraph -- the Brits tend to be better at scandal than us), but then those questions just went away because ... I guess everybody really, really wants to find the real life Great White Defendant like we've seen on Law & Order for 20 years.
On the other hand, the stuff in this article doesn't prove DSK didn't do it either. We just have a doubtful-sounding story from a doubtful-sounding accuser.
By the way, the prosecutors say they haven't found any evidence that a political conspiracy was behind it.
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43 comments:
Duke Lacross the Atlantic scandal?
Btw, is Pepe Lepew a 'racist' stereotype? If so, why is it still aired unlike BONG OF THE SOUTH?
No kidding!
I commented at Atlhouse in the early days of these charges that the woman could very well be a gold digger.
But, of course, I am a male chauvinist pig. I was roundly condemned.
She got into the U.S. via a phony asylum scam!
No kidding! Who woulda ever thunk it?
The whole thing never made sense to me.
How do you force someone to give you oral sex? Did he have a weapon on him?
"You know, as we saw with the Duke lacrosse case, on a personal level, it's generally a good idea to stay away from strippers and hookers."
I hear about guys being horribly screwed over by wives and girlfriends all the time. Including through the legal system. There is a danger here of making "respectable" women seem more respectable than they really are.
If you want to have kids, then for those kids' sake it's best to get married to the prospective mother. But one should definitely steer clear of illusions about women. Often it's not as much reality that ends up biting one, as one's illusions about it. On average, women and men have radically different conceptions of morality. Abstract, rules-based, not situation-dependent morality is very much a male thing.
Amazing. I have to admit that I sort of thought he was guilty of this charge. And perhaps he still is, but it goes without saying that the liklihood decreases dramatically.
Anyway, how does this impact a DSK presidential run?
The Great White Defendant was a lefty...?
Shouldn't she be awarded with the Pulitzer for creative fiction?
Tear off her mask, and it'll be Tom MacMaster. Black Asylum Seeking Woman in NY.
Also, the NYT article *still* doesn't mention the accuser's name. At what point can names be named?
He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years.
Countless Africans have contacted me over the years promising to do that, but it appears she actually got the money.
Innocent of rape or not, he is still a very bad, sexist pig, and that's reason enough to find him guilty
Good point about hookers and strippers, and I will go one better.
The ugly/sad reality is that most non-Whites have a big HATE HATE HATE for White folks, and White men in particular. So it is best to keep a polite, non-committal distance from them, and not involve ones self in any entanglement. Thus, you avoid problems.
So a female immigrant, asylum seeker, whatever, from Guinea proves not be a boon for America. What a surprise.
On a national level,...
It's worse than that: even after they've been let in and shown that's all they're good for, they are not often booted out.
Arizona connection? wtf?
OT
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/gallup-obama-hits-all-time-low-among-poo
"Gallup: Obama Hits All-Time Low Among Poor; Approval Comparatively Highest Among Rich"
highest among rich, but GOP is for tax cuts for the rich. oy vey.
Steve, can you please do a post on the original Bad News Bears movie.
I'm shocked - shocked - that the case against DSK seems to be collapsing. Who would have thought it possible?
I for one, cannot wait til he is back in charge of the IMF. That woman Lagarde, who replaced him; she has been in the job for 36 hours and hasn't even managed to rape anyone yet.
She is clearly incompetent.
Anon.
"You know, as we saw with the Duke lacrosse case, on a personal level, it's generally a good idea to stay away from strippers and hookers."
But, to be fair, this was a chambermaid.
OK... in the spirit of The Elders of this site, here is a little anecdote:
Once, during a longish solo stay in a great London Hotel, I found a single Rizla paper on my bedside table after the room had been cleaned. It struck me as extraordinarily sloppy at the time. Later it occurred to me that had I placed thirty pounds on top of the paper it would probably have been filled up with aromatic herbs the next day. I guess that is the role of the latter day Jeeves.
Gilbert P.
Not surprised. I was urging skepticism from the beginning about the likelihood of a decrepit unarmed man "forcing" a woman to give him a b.j. to completion. But a lot of people here were in a rush to find the Great Jewish Defendant, or the Great International Elite Defendant.
"...forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter..."
I think DSK's supporters got to her and she is being paid a lot of money to throw the case.
"on a personal level, it's generally a good idea to stay away from strippers and hookers"
If she's a hooker, then she's an amateur. So I would amend that advice to stay away from amateurs and wannabes. Call Mayflower Madam's escort service and pay the going rate, don't be penny wise and pound foolish.
She was described in the press as a "devout Muslim", implying she was a virtuous person, a hard working immigrant. DSK was a spoiled rotten sybarite who had a comeuppance coming for all his sins.
She's really part of an African network of grifters, drug smugglers,scammers, asylum fraudsters?
As if we don't have enough African types here already. I guess the Guineans are out to make their mark and prove they can out-hustle the Nigerians.
People in the Steve-o-sphere were desperate to believe these charges because DSK was Jewish.
It was such an obvious thing to behold given how skeptical the sphere usually is with these type of allegations.
Innocent of rape or not, he is still a very bad, sexist pig, and that's reason enough to find him guilty
Moreover, he's a hetero white male. That's reason enough to find him guilty.
I, for one, am delighted in how this story turned out. It allows me to loathe both frenchmen and dodgy immigrants.
-Osvaldo M.
So, will black woman lying about rape walk away without charges again?
So now when they adapt this for Stabler and Benson, it will be an African delegate to the UN gets accused by a Serbian hotel maid, who turns out to be a victim of trafficking my a male drug dealer/pimp.
The puzzling thing is that the others who came out after the fact do seem credible.
The French woman, Tristane Banon, recently declined to have her case linked with the maid's. At the time, it was seen as typical French anti-Americanism.
At the time I thought it was so strange because one of the reasons Tristane gave for going forward was to *help* the maid. Suddenly, then, she wants her case to have nothing to do with that case??
BTW, Steve, Ann Coulter said pretty much the same thing right after the Duke Lacrosse affair. She added it would be the one thing that nobody would learn.
I take sexual assault extremely seriously and will never again give a black woman the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a white man, no matter how sordid he is and virtuous she seems; can you top this case for those elements?
If she is lying, she is evil incarnate.
Agree about staying away from strippers and hookers, but then I'm 40, so its easy to say that. This is harder to do if you are 62.
"Cui Bono?" , is a compass contraindicated for simple-sighted paranoids but indispensible for the rest of us. The accused has been removed from the directing the IMF and from being a political threat to the American-annointed Sarkozy. Tbe details as I've been able to garner them from the early reports appear to be--as far as they go--consistent with the possibiity of an odd technical auditory "omniscience" in this alleged incident. One would hope the U.S. national security apparatus would be routinely monitoring the behavior and communications of important persons traveling in and out of our nation, but one would expect that honest professionals would be doing this task--not amateurs aiming to please. Relevant? Probably. Hopefully, the complete reach of all the facts will suggest no such possibility. But right now the "Cui Bono?" hangs heavy over it all.
No one, no matter how scummy, merits the false accusation and smug gotcha-talk that this man just endured. He's lost his job, his personal reputation has been forever tarnished (though his professional reputation is intact, including its disgustingly parasitic elitist-ism), and his marriage must be seriously strained. What does he do now? How does he get his reputation restored?
A scummy man like D-s, can run for the president of France ... and win. He'll got the sympathy as well as the anti-American vote locked up.
Got to feel a bit of pity for the gal who took his old job at the IMF. On her second (?) day at work, the rug has been pulled out from under her.
Ha, ha. It's nice to see that Steve has finally gotten sensible, and started to believe everything he reads in the august NYT, especially when reporters quote anonymous government sources making unspecified claims that the evidence against powerful individuals accused of wrongdoing isn't nearly as strong as was previously believed. In a similar vein, it was always obvious to me that none of Madoff's immediate family members---who'd all spent decades serving as the top executives in his family financial firm---had ever had the slightest suspicions of his long pattern of misbehavior.
As for the factual detail that one of the alleged victim's "fiances" is a criminal, I hardly find that tremendously surprising. Given the remarkable prison incarceration ratios of blacks living in NYC, it would be an interesting statistical exercise to attempt to estimate what fraction of that subpopulation is neither a criminal nor has an immediate family member or intimate relationship with someone who falls into that unfortunate category. Similarly, I remember reading a story somewhere that an international survey organization had discovered that some one-third of all black men in today's South Africa candidly admit to having committing a recent rape, so perhaps the IMF guy would have been on even safer grounds taking his vacations there instead, since virtually all potential victims or witnesses would certainlly be found non-credible in their testimony after an extensive investigation.
You vengeful people. Surely we're not entitled to another Great Jewish Defendant till Bernard Madoff finishes his 150-year sentence.
I wonder if Nafissatou Diallo ( as she's known to readers of the french press ) knew who DSK was. DSK's reputation and antecedents made these accusations plausible at the very least.
Re:female genital mutilation
Fulanis routinely practice fgm.
"I take sexual assault extremely seriously and will never again give a black woman the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a white man, no matter how sordid he is and virtuous she seems; can you top this case for those elements?"
Agreed.
"If she is lying, she is evil incarnate."
No, I'd guess she's simply not intelligent enough to understand the abstract aspects of morality. If she is lying, she probably justifies it to herself by thinking that after all, DSK wasn't physically hurt, he still has money, a home, a wife, etc. The damage done to his reputation and to the integrity of the investigators involved no doubt does not concern her one whit.
There has to be a certain level of intelligence for people to behave morally. Dumb people can, and often are, good-hearted. But that's not the same as having a moral framework on which you depend when doing and saying things that affect others. Instead, my observation has been that dumb people behave impulsively, take into account only concrete factors and plan only for the short term.
In other words, where internal policing is absent, external policing is essential.
I thought the AIDS home claim turned out to be untrue (or at least someone claimed it was untrue - maybe it was never resolved one way or the other).
To all the lawyers out there:
Why would the maid admit that she lied in her asylum petition about being persecuted and gang-raped back in Guinea? Surely, no one (until her admission)was going to Africa to check on her claims.
How did they find out about the money-laundering and her 5 phones? In a rape case, is it common to pull the accuser's bank accounts?
Why would the maid admit that she lied in her asylum petition about being persecuted and gang-raped back in Guinea? Surely, no one (until her admission)was going to Africa to check on her claims.
You know, stupid people tend to do not so smart things.
Come on... since when has any nonblack man ever actually raped a black woman? 1951, maybe?
I thought he was guilty.
It must be a set-up, because it would never occur to an attorney on his own to look for or bring up asylum status irregularities. He had orders/permission to do that, I think.
As to those asylum irregularities, they will be soft-pedaled in the media or will totally disappear there, since such things tend to throw an unflattering light on Le Grand Ideal of open borders. Look for the reefer money to be featured instead. As someone pointed out, that is the least surprising or interesting part of the accuser's janky background, since many blacks have some connection with criminal activity. Expect the pot thing to whooped up as a remarkable and outrageous rarity and surprise, though.
On Dick Wolf's Law and Order, this will become "white dolly dealer (named Buffy) manipulated by racist polo-playing prep-school boyfriend (named Dirk) into falsely accusing noble international statesman (named Francois) who has a vaguely non-WASP ethnicity."
"People in the Steve-o-sphere were desperate to believe these charges because DSK was Jewish.
It was such an obvious thing to behold given how skeptical the sphere usually is with these type of allegations."
Desparate to believe? Really?
I'm not sure who you mean by the Steve-o-sphere; I do keep an eye on much more explicitly anti-Jewish sites than this one, and the initial presumption of DSK's guilt was considerably less than unanimous.
Sure, DSK is part of the plutocratic Jewish elite, but, the popular suspicion amongst a sizable number of Jew-skeptical types wasn't that he had to be guilty because he was a Jew, but that he was probably set up because his downfall benefits other elite Jews. The idea that the head of the IMF would just randomly rape someone and be caught and arrested without any sort of protection from TPTB, didn't pass the smell test in many of the Jew-skeptical forums and blogs I look at (compared to which the Steve-o-sphere is pretty tame). It's not that DSK isn't loathsome and probably guilty of lots of bad things he gets away with due to his position; it's that people in his position don't generally get taken down by these sorts of charges, unless other elite persons want it to happen.
It really isn't hard to figure out that Jew-skeptical types are capable of more than one "mania" once you get past your delusion that Jew-skeptical types are mono-maniacs. They can chew gum and walk at the same time; elite Jews can and do fight amongst themselves; blacks can and do run their own private scams that aren't concocted by Jews. The world is a complex place and plenty of Jew-skeptical types are well aware of that fact. But it is more useful for many people to pretend otherwise as it gives them that comforting delusion that they are so much smarter and more sophisticated than those awful anti-semites.
"Come on... since when has any nonblack man ever actually raped a black woman? 1951, maybe? "
whoever made this comment is a moron...
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