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Strauss-Kahn maid makes appeal as civil suit looms
CASE MISHANDLED?
Diallo’s supporters on Thursday said District Attorney Cyrus Vance had mishandled the matter and should be replaced by a special prosecutor. They suggested race and poverty may be a factor in the prosecution’s treatment of the case and said Vance’s office leaked numerous false stories about Diallo to the media, making her case harder to win.
A spokeswoman for Vance declined to respond, saying the DA’s office does not comment on pending criminal cases.
Her lawyer Kenneth Thompson denied she was trying to shake the rich Frenchman down for cash, saying, “Nafi Diallo did not try to shake down Dominique Strauss-Kahn.”
Thompson promised action, saying he and her legal team “will take the civil case to trial because we are going to hold Dominique Strauss-Kahn accountable, whether it be in a criminal courtroom or in a civil lawsuit.”
Asked when such a civil suit would be filed, he responded, “I said soon. Soon is soon.”
Accusers in such cases normally hide from the media glare until after their criminal case is over. Many media outlets, including Reuters, protect their identities by not revealing their names. But Diallo, the daughter of an imam from Guinea, broke her silence on Sunday, revealing her identity in interviews to Newsweek and ABC News.
At the news conference at a Christian cultural center at the church Thompson attends, Diallo was flanked by members of women’s rights groups and advocates for Latinos and blacks. Diallo said the event was to thank supporters.
But some experts said her lawyers were pushing Vance not to drop the case because otherwise Diallo’s supporters might not vote for him if, as expected, he seeks reelection in 2013.
Diallo’s supporters on Thursday said District Attorney Cyrus Vance had mishandled the matter and should be replaced by a special prosecutor. They suggested race and poverty may be a factor in the prosecution’s treatment of the case and said Vance’s office leaked numerous false stories about Diallo to the media, making her case harder to win.
A spokeswoman for Vance declined to respond, saying the DA’s office does not comment on pending criminal cases.
Her lawyer Kenneth Thompson denied she was trying to shake the rich Frenchman down for cash, saying, “Nafi Diallo did not try to shake down Dominique Strauss-Kahn.”
Thompson promised action, saying he and her legal team “will take the civil case to trial because we are going to hold Dominique Strauss-Kahn accountable, whether it be in a criminal courtroom or in a civil lawsuit.”
Asked when such a civil suit would be filed, he responded, “I said soon. Soon is soon.”
Accusers in such cases normally hide from the media glare until after their criminal case is over. Many media outlets, including Reuters, protect their identities by not revealing their names. But Diallo, the daughter of an imam from Guinea, broke her silence on Sunday, revealing her identity in interviews to Newsweek and ABC News.
At the news conference at a Christian cultural center at the church Thompson attends, Diallo was flanked by members of women’s rights groups and advocates for Latinos and blacks. Diallo said the event was to thank supporters.
But some experts said her lawyers were pushing Vance not to drop the case because otherwise Diallo’s supporters might not vote for him if, as expected, he seeks reelection in 2013.
Top defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz has called Diallo’s media interviews, “a desperate gambit to try to put pressure on the prosecution to consider not dropping the case.”
Notwithstanding Thursday’s show of support, Diallo’s case has not brought a groundswell of public support or led to widespread outcries about Vance’s handling of the case.
“In my political travels around Manhattan, I don’t hear any of the woman activists jumping up and down that much,” said Arthur Greig, a lawyer and former New York County Democratic Committee counsel. “I haven’t seen or heard any groundswell.”
On Wednesday, Diallo and her lawyers held an eight-hour meeting with prosecutors focused largely on phone conversations she had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizonan jail after the May 14 incident. News reports suggested Diallo told him a day after the incident that Strauss-Kahn was rich.
But Thompson disputed those accounts after hearing the tapes, saying such interpretations of that conversation were not true and that prosecutors had botched their translations.
Strauss-Kahn is no longer under house arrest but is barred from leaving America and next appears in court on August 23.
Source: Reuters
