[italertb]

Seems that DSK may not have needed a reservation. From the NY Post, back at the time of his arrest (May 15):
... Strauss-Kahn got dressed and headed off to JFK for a flight to Paris.

When he was approached on the plane by Port Authority cops, he said, "What is this about?" sources said. He was taken off the aircraft without handcuffs.

Two law-enforcement sources said Strauss-Kahn was trying to flee authorities. Police said he left his cellphone and other personal items in the room.

"It looked like he got out of there in a hurry," Browne said.

Strauss-Kahn, who had a meeting planned for today with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, has an arrangement with Air France that allows him to get on any flight and sit in first class, the sources said. He was traveling alone.
However, a report from an internet site ( Inner City Press ) three days later (May 18) includes what is supposedly correspondence from the IMF that somewhat contradicts the info above about DSK's flight plans:
Strauss-Kahn Air France Upgrades & Sofitel Discounts Afoul of IMF Policy
By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

[...]

One of two IMF belated responses to Inner City Press on May 18:

From: Murray, William [at] imf.org
Date: Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:59 AM
Subject: Air France
To: Matthew Russell Lee [at] InnerCityPress.com

The IMF has contracts with various intercontinental air carriers due to heavy travel requirements from Washington. Air France is among the carriers.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn's flight, which was booked before he left Washington, was a business class seat. He was apparently upgraded by the airline. This is not unusual given he is the head of the International Monetary Fund.

[TouccuraLar]

Possible scenarios:

1. He did force himself on her, just as said.

2. She entrapped him, the sex was consentual, he was ignorant.

3. She entrapped him, the sex was consentual, but the lady did not keep her mouth shut (no pun) and DSK somehow got the word of what she was planning to do (maybe she confronted him the in the hotel room, or when leaving, to her plans so he high-tailed it out of there).

I think, in light of the latest evidence, the third is very likely.

I don't think anybodies hands are clean in this one....sadly.

[casinobonusnolimit]

If that's the case he wasn't thinking rationally. He could have accused her of blackmail to hotel management and she would have been suspended pending investigation. I'm not clear how a guy could rape someone in the mouth, unless he was a lot larger than the victim or the victim was tied up.

[HedoShoodovex]

Like I said, it does not sound like we have gotten the real story yet.....

[padlabtard]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/ny...gewanted=print

By JOHN ELIGON

As soon as she entered Room 2806 of the Sofitel New York, a hotel housekeeper said, a naked Dominique Strauss-Kahn pushed her to the bed and, as she sat, began to sexually assault her. She freed herself, only to have him pull her toward the bathroom. After she fell to the ground, she said, he forced her again into a sexual act.

Versions of this narrative have been told in court and in various criminal documents since Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested in May on sexual assault charges.

But this is the most direct account of the housekeeper’s version of events to be offered so far. It comes from a report prepared by a counselor at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where the housekeeper was treated just hours after she said she was attacked, and where she related for one of the first times what happened in the hotel suite.

The report, which has been provided to prosecutors and defense lawyers, provides a counselor’s notes of the graphic story told by the 32-year-old Guinean housekeeper, whose credibility has since been called into serious question by prosecutors because of lies they say she told during her immigration application and at other times.

While prosecutors now express severe doubts about the strength of their case, this account is suggestive of a serious sexual assault, which led prosecutors to charge Mr. Strauss-Kahn with attempted rape and sexual abuse.

There are a couple of sentences in the report, however, that the defense could focus on, most notably one that could be interpreted as the housekeeper’s saying that after the alleged attack, she observed Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, getting dressed — something that would run counter to her later version of what happened.

Although the Manhattan district attorney’s office agreed last week to release Mr. Strauss-Kahn from house arrest, prosecutors said they still believed that there was evidence of a forcible sexual attack.

Most of their problems with the case, they said, had to do not with the woman’s account of the attack, but rather with inconsistencies in her life story — lies she told on her asylum application and tax returns; deposits that were made to a bank account in her name; and a conversation she had with a man in federal custody in Arizona.

The one major discrepancy that prosecutors have pointed out in the woman’s version of the attack is that in her grand jury testimony, she said she waited in the hallway for Mr. Strauss-Kahn to leave after the attack. But she has since told investigators that she cleaned a nearby room after the attack, according to the prosecution.

The account given to the rape counselor stands out for its detail.

According to the counselor’s notes, the woman said a room service attendant had told her that no one was in the suite. As soon as the housekeeper walked in, she told the counselor, a man, “naked, with ‘white hair,’ ” locked the door behind her and pushed her onto the bed.
He “put his penis into her mouth briefly,” the report said. She told him to stop and tried to get away, according to the report, but he pulled her toward the bathroom. He put his hands under her clothes and touched her crotch area, the report said. After she fell to the carpeted floor, according to the report, Mr. Strauss-Kahn again forced her to perform oral sex, grabbing her by the hair and controlling her head with force.
The woman’s lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, has since said the housekeeper suffered bruising to her vagina during the episode.

She spit onto the carpet once the sexual encounter was over, according to the report. Then, the report said, the patient “reports he got dressed” and “left the room, and that he said nothing to her during the incident.”

Those sentences raise the question of exactly where the woman was when Mr. Strauss-Kahn got dressed. If she was in the room, it would not be consistent with the two versions she has told investigators, both of which have her fleeing the room after the attack. It also raises the question of what communication they had with each other if Mr. Strauss-Kahn did not speak.

The lawyer William W. Taylor III, who along with Benjamin Brafman is representing Mr. Strauss-Kahn, declined to comment.

The report continues that the woman washed out her mouth with water. The woman also told her supervisor that there was blood on the bedsheets but that it did not belong to her, the report said. The woman was interviewed by Special Victims Squad detectives at the hospital and called her daughter, the report said.

Daniel R. Alonso, the chief assistant to the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also declined to comment.
But in interviews over the weekend, prosecutors in the office have maintained that they have done what they are supposed to do, given the evidence they had at each step of the case.

“We’re doing our job,” said Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, the lead prosecutor on the Strauss-Kahn case. “We don’t get paid by indictment. We don’t get paid by convictions. We get paid to do the right thing.”

[hLabXZlK]

So if you're grabbing someone by the head, that means the victim's hands are free to push back or (duh) grab on to his nuts and squeeze like hell.

[DoctoNilsonDen]

Stache, I agree, but the thing we need to keep in mind is that if you are someone who is afraid of their own safety, you do not attack an aggressor if something worse could happen....


It does not make complete sense, but I can see an argument being made for it.

The only thing that questions her credibility is not, in my mind, he lying on her Visa/other applications. There are many that will say anything to get into the States. The thing(s) that get(s) me are (is) her connections. The BF with the drug deal? It is one thing to lie about abuse to get you on better soil, it is another to keep bed with thieves once you do.

[Hervams]

I know it's somewhat counter-intuitive to think that forced oral sex is easy to pull off or even probable (think of the possible danger to the guy doing the forcing), but I'm hoping you're not claiming that it's impossible for a person of greater strength, greater desire, greater power to do such a thing.

[RarensussyRen]

I do not think that the "inconsistenties in her life story" necessarily negate the possibility that she was sexually assaulted. We just don't know enough about the physical evidence or lack thereof.

[Promotiona]

Strauss-Kahn accuser files libel lawsuit against NY Post over prostitute claim

By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, July 5, 12:52 PM

NEW YORK — The New York City hotel maid at the center of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex assault case has filed a libel lawsuit against the New York Post after it called her a prostitute.

The woman’s lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, filed the claim Tuesday in Bronx state Supreme Court. A series of Post articles over the weekend said the 32-year-old was a “prostitute,” and “hooker” and that she “traded sex for money.”

The lawsuit says that the statements are false.

The Post didn’t immediately comment.

Strauss-Kahn was released without bail Friday after prosecutors said new information about the woman’s life had forced them to reconsider the case. They say she lied about details surrounding how she came to the U.S.

The woman maintains the sexual assault occurred.


Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

[joulseenjoync]

That's a tough one....

I do not like the way the Post reports some things (and they are definitely libelous sometimes), but I am not too sure that this will really help anybody in the end.....

It is at least some comfort that this woman has learned the way things operate in the States..... or maybe she is being coached... :hmm:

[ENCOSEARRALIA]

And...

July 5th, 2011

DSK facing divided French sentiment amidst new attempted rape accusations
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, faces new challenges this week with French writer Tristane Banon accusing him of attempted rape in a 2003 incident. Strauss-Kahn has filed countercharges against Banon for "false declarations,"' a lawyer for DSK told CNN Monday.

This news comes amidst reports that the Manhattan DA's case against Strauss-Kahn seems to be crumbling due to credibility issues with the hotel maid who has accused him of rape.

© 2010 Cable News Network

[AM1VV9r6]

Can he save the world financial market from jail?


Can we get him a laptop or somethnig?

[Prealiitellg]

They have to keep bringing this up & not let it pass. She was planning something, even if she started planning it spur of the moment in his room. This is very damning evidence for her. At first I thought it was rape, but in light of all these things, especially this phone call, I don't.

Twenty-eight hours after a housekeeper at the Sofitel New York said she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she spoke by phone to a boyfriend in an immigration jail in Arizona.

Investigators with the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned the call had been recorded and had it translated from a “unique dialect of Fulani,” a language from the woman’s native country, Guinea, according to a well-placed law enforcement official.

When the conversation was translated — a job completed only this Wednesday — investigators were alarmed: “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing,’ ” the official said.

[N9u9ie4p]

July 5, 2011

Still a Case for Trying Strauss-Kahn

By JIM DWYER

What is so wrong with the original plan to hold a trial for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to decide if he committed an act of sexual violence against a hotel housekeeper?

After all, it’s not as if the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, has simply dissolved with the discovery that the woman who accused him has lied about her past, and had shady connections and a bank account with irregular cash deposits.

To begin with, there is evidence in the case that other people can provide, notably, crime lab results that show the semen of Mr. Strauss-Kahn was found on her clothing.

But that is only the beginning.

In the moments after the encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the housekeeper, four employees at the Sofitel New York each spoke to her, one after the other, and each was convinced that she was “shook up” and “in distress,” according to a person involved with that part of the investigation. “You had two former police officers who didn’t think she was making it up,” the person said.

Hotel records show the housekeeper had never before cleaned a room that Mr. Strauss-Kahn occupied during any of his visits. On the morning of May 14, records of her card-key entries show that she spent about an hour cleaning Room 2820, which was around the corner from the rooms occupied by Mr. Strauss-Kahn. Just after 12 p.m., a room service employee knocked on his door several times, got no answer, then entered to collect a room service wagon.

The housekeeper was told by the room service worker that there was no one in the suite, and she used her card key to enter at 12:06.

This would appear to undercut any theory that the housekeeper had chosen Mr. Strauss-Kahn because of his prominence.

During the next 20 minutes, the housekeeper and Mr. Strauss-Kahn had the encounter that is the subject of the criminal charges.

The housekeeper’s key was next used at 12:26 — when she returned to Room 2820, the same room that she had already cleaned. But she did not stay there long. Her supervisor arrived on the floor, she was met by the housekeeper, and the card-key records show that they then went into 2806, the Strauss-Kahn suite, also at 12:26. (The card-key records are accurate to the minute, not to the second.)

By then, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was on his way to the front desk, where he was seen checking out about 12:28. Hotel video turned over to the authorities shows him with toothpaste residue on his lips, and then entering a yellow cab.

His lawyers maintain that whatever happened between Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the housekeeper did not involve force or criminal behavior. They have also said that videotape of him at lunch, just after he left the hotel, would show a calm demeanor. With last week’s revelations about the housekeeper, the lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn have said the case should be dismissed.

There is little question that the police and Manhattan prosecutors had probable cause to arrest Mr. Strauss-Kahn: they believed a crime had been committed, and he had been involved.

Prosecutors do not have to abandon criminal cases simply over problems with witnesses’ backgrounds, said Bruce Green, a law professor at Fordham and an authority on legal ethics.

“If you think the case is still tryable, that the jury will understand that although the person has not been truthful about things in the past, you can proceed,” Mr. Green said.

With a jury trial, 12 people would decide the most important questions, which do not include who will run for president of France next year or if Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, messed things up. Bringing charges and then dropping them is not a dishonorable act. Letting criminals get away with ugly crimes is another story.

In the end, the only thing that matters is if Mr. Strauss-Kahn assaulted the housekeeper. His lawyers say he is innocent, a status he maintains until a jury finds otherwise. The housekeeper insists that she was the victim of a crime, said her lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson. He disputes the translation of a taped phone call, made the day after the encounter, that the authorities believe shows her to be thinking about exploiting Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wealth.

“She wants to testify to the world what Mr. Strauss-Kahn did to her, and she is willing to be hammered on cross-examination,” Mr. Thompson said. “You don’t have to come over on the Mayflower to be the victim of a crime.”

E-mail: Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

© 2011 The New York Times Company


By then, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was on his way to the front desk, where he was seen checking out about 12:28. Hotel video turned over to the authorities shows him with toothpaste residue on his lips, and then entering a yellow cab. Someone needs to get this uploaded on YouTube.

[BarBoss]

How do they know it's toothpaste?

[DumErrory]

Trust lofter to print what I was thinking. Maybe he got a snowball.

[QUOTE=ZippyTheChimp

“She is willing to be hammered on cross-examination,” Mr. Thompson said. [/QUOTE]

Seems like she's been hammered enough.

[AlexanderPalamayr]

How do they know it's toothpaste?

He was in pajamas and holding a toothbrush?

[duawLauff]

July 3, 2011

What Strauss-Kahn and His Accuser Risked

Amy Davidson

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was first accused of raping a hotel housekeeper, who said that he had attacked her when she walked into his suite to clean it, one of the questions people asked was why he would risk such a thing. Didn’t a man in his position have a great deal to lose? He did; so, as it turned out, did she, to the extent that she may be facing criminal charges, even as he has been released on his own recognizance, though the case is still pending for now. Whatever calculation Strauss-Kahn made when he decided to engage in what all sides agree was a sexual encounter of some sort between strangers, it seems that he knew more than she did about the danger and its management. (He had pleaded not guilty, but his defense was expected to be that there had been consensual sex.) Strauss-Kahn also may have known something that the woman knew just as well or better, something that may have taken the D.A.’s office longer than it should have to figure out: people have complicated lives.

Whatever happened in that suite, the housekeeper was, as we now know, a risk-taker. As the Times first reported, the prosecution learned that she hadn’t told the truth to them, or to immigration authorities, or to either, about the life she had in Guinea, including an allegation that soldiers raped her (she now says the circumstances of the rape were different). At some point, she seems to have weighed the hazard, or just deprivation, of staying in Africa against the risk of lying on an asylum application; and then, when she was interviewed by prosecutors, the risk of sticking to a false story against telling a new one. What upset the prosecutors, apparently, was that she lied to their faces. But either option would have hurt her on the witness stand. (Strauss-Kahn’s team had investigators checking her background.) Once she lied to get out of Guinea, was she no longer credible as a rape victim in this country? And how vulnerable does that mean any imperfect woman is?

Once she got to the Bronx, as a single mother, she also took risks that don’t, from the outside, look like smart ones: claiming a friend’s child as a dependent on her own tax returns; understating her income to keep public housing; depositing or allowing others to deposit questionable amounts of cash into her bank account; paying bills to multiple cell-phone companies. (One might think about one’s own participation in cash economies—paying nannies, for example—and how the things we each are least proud of in our own lives would sound in court.) The person in Strauss-Kahn’s life with money is his wife, Anne Sinclair, and her wealth, inherited from a grandfather who dealt in Picassos, has done much to shield him from danger. His accuser was reportedly involved with a man who is now in an immigration prison in Arizona, after being picked up for trafficking marijuana. If she ever saw him as a protector, he isn’t one now.

The prosecutors were particularly shaken by the Arizona prison’s recording of a phone call the woman made to the man a day after the incident—and perhaps they were right to be. “A well-placed law enforcement official" told the Times that in it “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing’ ” But I’d reserve judgment on that one, at least in terms of the truth of what happened in the hotel suite. First, her lawyer said that in the same call she repeated her story; second, I’m not sure that what a woman would say to calm down an allegedly criminal boyfriend is all that dispositive; and the conversation was in what the official told the Times was a “unique dialect of Fulani,” obscure enough that it had taken prosecutor until this week to get a translation. Anyone who followed the wildly conflicting linguistic testimony in the Forest Hills Bukaharan-dentist-murder case—and anyone who didn’t should read Janet Malcolm’s great account—will remember how tricky those dialects can be in court.

Here is something else that the New York Post found very suspicious: “The woman also had ‘a lot of her expenses—hair braiding, salon expenses—paid for by men not related to her,’ the source said.” The source, “close to the defense investigation,” called the woman a prostitute—an angle the Post has pushed. (Caption Sunday: “The infamous Sofitel maid/hooker.”) Indeed, the Post has gone further, allowing defense sources to suggest that prostitution is a recognized aspect of a maid’s profession, and that the hotel workers’ union is a sort of institutional procuress that sent her to the Sofitel because she was an “earner.” (The union strongly denies it.) That insults thousands of other women who work hard cleaning up after hotel guests.

But the Post’s story may be a look at what the defense had planned before it knew how little work it would have to do to discredit her. Its challenge was explaining why the housekeeper would decide to engage in consensual sex with Strauss-Kahn, whom she had just met pushing a cleaning cart, and not, say, while he was charming guests at a party in Paris. To review: the woman was found by her supervisor, apparently distraught, with what forensic tests showed was Strauss-Kahn’s semen on her clothes. One new discrepancy is that there was a longer interval than she’d told a grand jury between that point and whatever had happened—she had even begun cleaning another suite. Was she, as her lawyer suggests, simply in shock—fearing for her job? The Post’s defense source has another scenario: that she was processing a “humiliating exchange” in which she had oral sex with Strauss-Kahn, who then “refused to pay” for her services:


“There was an expectation of money after the fact, but he was dismissive,” the source said.

And not gently, the source said—D.S.K. brushed off the maid’s request as he turned his back and got dressed.

This may be pure fantasy. (There were also indications of a physical struggle.) But if, for the sake of argument, it is the gospel truth, what picture would we be left with? Is the image of a wealthy man deciding that there was little risk in not paying a prostitute or, for that matter, in using one, all that attractive? For a man whose own side is telling reporters that he did what Eliot Spitzer did—except that Spitzer paid what he owed—Strauss-Kahn has looked awfully pleased with himself since being released from house arrest. (He and Sinclair took in an exhibit at MOMA today.) Observers, and I’d include myself, have erred in assuming this case was simpler than it is. Still, the word “vindication,” which has been thrown around quite a bit, is a deeply odd one. After the woman was called a liar by the prosecutor’s office, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Strauss-Kahn’s philosopher friend, was out proclaiming victory. In his earlier defense of Strauss-Kahn, Levy relied on notions of privilege that remain unattractive, and also cheaply disparaged a French journalist who has said for years that Strauss-Kahn attacked her, and for whom no one has yet come up with a boyfriend in a prison in Arizona. According to the Guardian, Lévy told Le Parisien that Strauss-Kahn had been “lynched” by the “friends of minorities” in the U.S. He said that because the victim was “poor and immigrant” she had been presumed innocent, and because Strauss-Kahn was “powerful” he had been presumed guilty.

Friends of minorities? Is it simply that Lévy misjudges, rather profoundly, the precarious positions in which poor and powerless woman in America—or in Guinea, or anywhere—can find themselves? He does seem very worried about the risks to powerful men; but perhaps he needn’t be.

Amy Davidson is a senior editor at The New Yorker.

The New Yorker © 2011 Condé Nast Digital



What prostitute doesn't ask for payment in advance?

[hasasnn2345tv]

This whole story just stinks of filth.