DSK Maid Goes Public
[There was a video here]
The hotel maid accusing Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape, Nafissatou Diallo, has spoken out in Newsweek and on ABC News. If you spent the last few weeks being called a hooker and a liar, you'd probably want to give your side of the story, too.
Here's how she described her encounter—which lasted no more than 15 minutes, according to Newsweek—with DSK:
"Hello? Housekeeping." Diallo looked around the living room. She was standing facing the bedroom in the small entrance hall when the naked man with white hair appeared.
"Oh, my God," said Diallo. "I'm so sorry." And she turned to leave. "You don't have to be sorry," he said. But he was like "a crazy man to me." He clutched at her breasts. He slammed the door of the suite.
Diallo is about 5 feet 10, considerably taller than Strauss-Kahn, and she has a sturdy build. "You're beautiful," Strauss-Kahn told her, wrestling her toward the bedroom. "I said, ‘Sir, stop this. I don't want to lose my job,'" Diallo told NEWSWEEK. "He said, ‘You're not going to lose your job.'" An ugly incident with a guest-any guest-could threaten everything Diallo had worked for. "I don't look at him. I was so afraid. I didn't expect anyone in the room."
"He pulls me hard to the bed," she said. He tried to put his penis in her mouth, she said, and as she told the story she tightened her lips and turned her face from side to side to show how she resisted. "I push him. I get up. I wanted to scare him. I said, ‘Look, there is my supervisor right there.'" But the man said there was nobody out there, and nobody was going to hear.
Diallo kept pushing him away: "I don't want to hurt him," she told us. "I don't want to lose my job." He shoved back, moving her down the hallway from the bedroom toward the bathroom. Diallo's uniform dress buttoned down the front, but Strauss-Kahn didn't bother with the buttons, she said. He pulled it up around her thighs and tore down her pantyhose, gripping her crotch so hard that it was still red at the hospital, hours later. He pushed her to her knees, her back to the wall. He forced his penis into her mouth, she said, and he gripped her head on both sides. "He held my head so hard here," she said, putting her hands to her cranium. "He was moving and making a noise. He was going like ‘uhh, uhh, uhh.' He said, ‘Suck my'-I don't want to say." The report from the hospital where Diallo was taken later for examination notes that "she felt something wet and sour come into her mouth and she spit it out on the carpet."
Some lawyerly-types are pissed that Diallo's lawyer would allow her to "poison the jury pool" with public accusations. Because, until now, there has been absolutely no media coverage that could have possibly affected how a jury would view Diallo?
The interview was clearly a strategic decision by Diallo's lawyers to press the D.A. to continue with her increasingly uncertain case, brought to near-collapse by Diallo's connections to crime and past lying on a asylum application. "I want him to go to jail," Diallo told Newsweek. "I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money." If it wasn't clear before, DSK is officially being tried in the court of public opinion now. The New York Post is the defense, bloggers are the jury and internet commenters are the judges. God help us all.