Before #MeToo: The Dreadful Case of the State of New York v. Strauss-Kahn
By: L. Wachi
Tags: Feminism, True Crime, Society, Race, Sexism

The Netflix documentary Room 2806: The Accusation examines media, the criminal justice system, and the treatment of sexual assault victims.

Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash

Note: This article discusses a sexual assault case and includes sensitive details that some readers may wish to avoid. Also, most people refer to the alleged assailant as DSK. This sounds a little too familiar and affectionate for me. Since I’m not a fan, throughout the article I refer to Dominique Strauss-Kahn as Strauss-Kahn.

Netflix just released a four-part documentary about another shattering sexual assault case. News of an attack on an employee at Sofitel, a five-star accommodation in Manhattan with an elite clientele, shocked many around the world. Grainy footage from surveillance cameras placed throughout the hotel show the following on May 14, 2011:

A hotel employee (a woman) from the housekeeping department enters room 2806 at approximately 12:06 p.m. The employee exits room 2806 around 10 minutes later. Five minutes after the employee exits the room, a man wearing a trench coat, suitcase in hand, also exits the room and enters an elevator. The same man checks out of the hotel and leaves the building. The employee speaks to a woman, her supervisor, presumably on a lower floor of the hotel. The employee enters an employee area accompanied by security personnel. NYPD officers enter the employee area and speak with the employee.

Obviously, there are no surveillance cameras in guest rooms, so what happened in room 2806 in those 10 minutes became a case of he said, she said, he being Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund/popular French presidential hopeful. She being Nafissatou Diallo, employee in the hotel housekeeping department/immigrant from Guinea, West Africa.

To her coworkers, supervisor, security personnel, and then NYPD Special Victims officers, Diallo alleged a sexual assault committed by Strauss-Kahn and recalled the chilling encounter in detail.

CONTENT WARNING — description of assault follows (this paragraph only): Shortly after entering room 2806, which Diallo thought was empty, as per her cleaning schedule, a man attacked her seemingly out of nowhere, threw her to the floor, and assaulted her. Diallo crashed into a bathroom sink or toilet as she hit the floor, causing injury to her shoulder. While the attack was in progress, Diallo recalled “wanting or needing to vomit,” and “spitting fluid,” according to a timeline published in the Daily Beast quoting sources familiar with the case.

NYPD considered Diallo account of the assault credible and, along with the Port Authority police, raced to JFK Airport to arrest Strauss-Kahn, who was about to board a flight back to France.

Strauss-Kahn’s first appearance before a judge didn’t go well. He was denied bail and remanded to the NY Department of Correction facility at Rikers Island. He would later be allowed to await any potential trial in an upscale apartment in Tribeca rented by his wife, journalist Anne Sinclair.

NYPD believed they had a solid witness and a strong case, but it ended with Strauss-Kahn and his family leaving New York all smiles, no charges filed.

So why was justice so elusive in what appeared to be a clear-cut case of sexual assault?

The Manhattan District Attorney

The documentary Room 2806 doesn’t sugar coat its depiction of the Manhattan District Attorney’s team— the long and the short of it is that they just weren’t that into finding justice for Diallo.

Instead of investigating Strauss-Kahn, DA investigators dove deep into Diallo’s past, and in the end, they impeached their own witness based on matters not associated with the alleged rape. Specifically, investigators found that she had lied on her asylum application.

In order to gain refugee status in the United States, Diallo admits that she lied that she had been sexually assaulted in Guinea. She asserts that her attorney at the time advised her to lie.

The other issue at hand — she also communicated with a family friend while the individual was incarcerated in Arizona. She shared her bank account with the person, and he deposited $60,000 — Diallo says it was the person’s earnings from selling handbags in Arizona. Prosecutors said this seemed shady.

Why was the DA’s office so hell bent on impeaching the witness? Just a hunch — Strauss-Kahn hired highly successful celebrity defense attorney Benjamin Brafman, who counted high-profile clients such as Sean Combs, Michael Jackson, and Harvey Weinstein among his long list of wealthy clients. The DA’s office maybe figured they would lose a ‘he said-she said’ case pitting a powerful white man against a lowly African immigrant, impeached Diallo, effectively falling on their swords.

If the DA’s office truly wanted to try Strauss-Kahn in court, investigators could have interviewed him to gauge his truthfulness with respect to the allegation, but they did not. Instead they chose to impeach the witness over things in her past that had nothing to do with the fact that she was attacked at Sofitel.

The media

The U.S. media shaped public perception of the case, and reporting was as simplistic as it was brutal. The New York Post insinuated — there was no way that a wealthy, prominent, French, European, white politician would stoop so low as to have a sexual encounter with an African housekeeper. So the woman must be lying. And if anything happened, it must have been consensual. So how would the leader of the IMF be caught in a compromising position with an African immigrant housekeeper? She must have been a prostitute, suggested the media.

The New York Post in particular went so far as to allege that Diallo was a member of a prostitution ring run out of the largest hospitality union in the United States, Unite Here. The union provided the media with a significant amount of evidence to contradict the lie, but making Diallo sound like a prostitute sold newspapers and got clicks, so the Post published stories highlighting the allegation anyway.

French media was no better when reporting on the case. Journalists played on the heartstrings of disappointed supporters only reporting the basics of the case and not facts about what was actually known about Kahn’s background and pattern of aggressive behavior against women.

Has the #MeToo movement made a difference?

The Weinstein and Cosby cases have been instructive in terms of understanding the impact of the #MeToo movement. A call to believe the victims, at the very least, requires prosecutors to investigate claims of the sexual assault based on witness accounts and not on extraneous information unrelated to the case. Progress has been made, but there’s still a long way to go.

The victim had no choice but to move on. Eventually, she had her say

As is often the case, victims of sexual assault who are denied justice have to suck it up and deal with it. There’s not enough evidence, the statute of limitations has expired, or “you’re just not credible as a witness,” are familiar reasons why assailants go free.

For this reason, Room 2806 did well to set the camera as close to Diallo’s face as possible. She tells us her story. She cries. She laughs. And, she tells the truth.

What moved me most was the way Diallo’s eyes light up talking about how much she liked her job at Sofitel and life in New York City. Working in a hotel can be stressful, but it can also be a lot of fun, especially when there’s a holistic workplace culture.

I could just see her enjoying being in the United States, working at a cool upscale hotel, making enough money to pay her bills, and enjoying time with her family. I felt so sad as she talked about how her encounter with Strauss-Kahn took that all away in an instant.

Establishing yourself in this world is hard enough as a woman, a black woman, and even harder as an black woman/immigrant. To have stability ripped away in 10 minutes by some selfish person’s primal desires is just sad and very wrong.

In a civil case, Diallo was awarded $1.2 million, which she may have used to rebuild her life after the alleged assault.

Another assailant got away with “it”… yet again

Those in the media and politics, especially in France, knew exactly who Strauss-Kahn was and what he was capable of, but the average person on the street didn’t. Lack of facts made it easy for followers of the case to take sides and condemn Diallo’s account of the alleged assault as untruthful.

Most people didn’t know that Strauss-Kahn had a reputation for forcing himself onto women. They didn’t know he was being investigated for pimping in France. But the reality of Strauss-Kahn was well known by political and media elites in France who laughed off his behavior as ultra “romantic” and amusing.

At that time, the average news watcher didn’t understand what victims of sexual assault go through when dealing with the justice system. The average person didn’t know that in the eyes of the courts, victims not only must tell the truth, they must show impeccable character for their accounts to be believed.

Inspired by Diallo’s courage in 2011, French writer and Paris Match contributor Tristane Banon filed suit against Strauss-Kahn for attempted rape, an alleged incident from 2003. The case was dropped due to the statute of limitations — France considers rape of an adult a less-serious crime, thus the three-year limit to bring charges.

To this day, in spite of numerous investigations and several cases, Strauss-Kahn has no criminal record. He believes that he has never committed a crime.

In his first television interview after returning to France from New York, he asserted that being a politician made people hold him to a higher standard, and that any sexual encounter he has ever had, in his whole life, has been consensual.

Room 2806: The Accusation presents the facts. Was it the assailant’s status and privilege that has made it possible for him to evade punishment? You be the judge.

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