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Strauss-Kahn maid makes appeal as civil suit looms
The hotel maid who accused ex-IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her made an emotional public appeal on Thursday for people to believe her story as her lawyer threatened a civil lawsuit.
In a highly unusual news conference, Nafissatou Diallo (pictured), told reporters she cannot stop crying and that she wants no other woman to suffer like her, first at the hands of a powerful attacker and then through media muckraking.
“I am going through a lot. My daughter, we are going through a lot. We are crying everyday. We can’t sleep,” an emotional and tearful Diallo said in broken English. “A lot of things they say about me are not true.”
When she finished her remarks, her lawyer promised to file a civil lawsuit against her attacker “soon.”
The case pits an illiterate, immigrant, 32-year-old mother and hotel maid against a powerful politician. She has said he behaved like a “crazy man” on May 14 in his suite at the luxury Sofitel hotel near Times Square. She alleges he brutally forced her to perform oral sex on him and attempted to rape her.
The 62-year-old Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund who was viewed as a possible French president, denies the charges and contends any sex that afternoon with Diallo was consensual.
Diallo, known as “Nafi” to her friends, said her daughter told her: “She goes, ‘Mom, please promise me you stop crying. People call you bad names because they don’t know you.'”
“You have to remember this guy is a powerful man,” Diallo said, adding that she told her daughter, “I am going to be strong for you and for every other woman in the world.”
“What happened to me, I don’t want to happen to any other woman,” she said. “I said, ‘God, Why me?'”
The case against Strauss-Kahn has teetered for weeks since prosecutors disclosed they had uncovered discrepancies in Diallo’s account of her past, and of the immediate aftermath of the alleged assault.
With her credibility in doubt, prosecutors continue to investigate the criminal case as they mull whether to press ahead with charges or to drop the case.
The media event was the latest twist in a case which has generated lurid headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Post called Diallo a prostitute and she has since sued the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid for libel.
