With a False Tale, the Strauss-Kahn Case Falls Apart

[The Northerner]

For those who thought, as I did, that the best way to resolve the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case was to have a jury decide his guilt or innocence, the brief filed this week by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., shows in powerful detail why that approach almost certainly would have been unethical and a fool’s errand.

Take, for instance, the story of the gang rape that the hotel housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, told and retold, and that seemed to have been associated with her application for asylum.

Many people might have been inclined to write off the gang-rape tale as the sort of tactical fiction that people deploy to gain entry to the United States. Such a lie would make sense in Darwinian terms, conferring an advantage on her and her child, but seem to have little bearing on her credibility about Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Ms. Diallo did not, in fact, tell the gang-rape lie on her asylum application.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/nyregion/housekeepers-false-tale-undid-strauss-kahn-case.html

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[Electric Monk]

2. All the "hang him now, ask questions later" DUers will be along shortly to apologize.

Or, maybe not...

[KittyWampus]

4. Why apologize, he's a pig with a history of abusing women. He's lucky this woman had a history

of doing what it takes to get into America. Like a lot of other immigrants DU'ers REGULARLY defend.

He also has all the money and clout in the world to publicize all information about this woman to make her look as bad as possible.

[JDPriestly]

8. And she is quite a liar.

Defending her does no service to the many, many women and children (and yes, men) who are physically abused in our country every year.

[Modern_Matthew]

3. VERDICT: With a big enough bank account, you can rape anyone. nt

[JDPriestly]

7. You really should read the facts and not jump to a conclusion that

suits your prejudices.

He may have raped other people. Maybe he harasses people.

But the events in this case did not occur as she described them. She is a special case.

This is not to deny the high incidence of rape in our society.

[KittyWampus]

5. Yeah, read the story. She gave the gang-rape story but it was written on her application. So she

repeated it later on because she thought it was on the record.

Strauss-Kahn is a lucky pig.

My sympathy is with all the women he's abused in the past and gotten away with it.

[JDPriestly]

6. You did not read the New York Times version.

She had a lot of versions of her story-- three according to Le Monde.

Then on top of that she admitted to investigators that she had totally fabricated her story about the gang rape by 24 men(which, she had claimed occurred in front of her two-year-old).

She did not, I repeat, did not tell the story about the gang rape in her immigration application.

She explained that a man had taped the story and she had memorized it and told it convincingly to authorities. Conspiracy of some sort? And who and what were behind it? Greed or more?

The lawyers -- not just the prosecutors -- but as I understood the articles -- also her own lawyer -- urged her to tell the truth.

She lied so convincingly that she could not go before a jury. She would have been exposed as a liar.

I caught on early because I have talked to people who really were abused, and this story did not fit together. There are always slight discrepancies in stories about abuse. But from the beginning, the way this alleged victim told it, the facts that she emphasized, it just did not sound like a true story.

I have heard both true and false stores about assaults of this kind. Many people have much more experience than I do in listening these stories. But because I was trying to learn how to tell truth from fact, how to assess what a person was saying, I observed carefully.

This woman was not telling the truth. If you tried to visualize the scene she described and then you looked at her and him, it just did not fit. And they had no prior relationship. Also the nature of the sexual act -- nothing made sense.

Plus, there were alternative explanations for the "evidence" that I read about. You have to approach these stories with great care and skepticism.

Abuse of women and children (and also of some men) is a very real, very serious problem. Too many of these incidents go unpunished.

It is very hard to get people to believe the many true stories of abuse and rape (especially when the victim is a man), so it makes me very upset when someone makes a story up. That is because the falsehood makes it easier to discredit the story of someone who really has been abused.

[WhiteTara]

9. actually, it was NOT on her application

So the gang rape was not a piece of her personal 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 Ms. Diallo’s ability to weep over a sexual assault that had never taken place, and then to quickly pile another falsehood on top of it.

“Most significant is her ability to recount that fiction as fact with complete conviction,” the prosecutors wrote.

Having been tricked by Ms. Diallo, none of the seasoned lawyers or investigators could ask a jury to convict Mr. Strauss-Kahn based on those very tools of dramatic persuasion. Her gang-rape performance, they wrote, was “fatal.”

Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been quickly arrested based on Ms. Diallo’s convincing report of a crime. In retrospect, it might have been better to slow down the proceedings, but Mr. Strauss-Kahn exercised his right to silence, so only Ms. Diallo’s version of events — and tests that showed his semen on her clothes — were available to the grand jury that indicted him.

[itsallhappening]

10. Reminds me of the Duke Lacrosse "rape" sham.