What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?

Edward Jay Epstein

May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for between DSK and Diallo had occurred JFK Airport in time to catch his 4:40 is that DSK called his daughter on his PM flight to Paris. IMF BlackBerry at 12:13 to tell her he Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of over two hours earlier. would be late. the International Monetary Fund and Part of the delay in bringing in the poAfter DSK completed his call, he leading contender to unseat Nicolas lice may have been the result of Diallos e had finished packing his suitcase dressed and put on his light black topSarkozy as president of France in the not immediately voicing her complaint. just before noon, according to his own coat. He carried with him only one April 2012 elections. Waking up in the After she had left DSK in the presidenaccount, and then took a shower in small overnight bag and a briefcase presidential suite of the Sofitel New tial suite around 12:13 PM the time of his call to Camilleshe remained on the bathroom, which is connected to (which contained his iPad and several York hotel that morning, he was supthe VIP floor. The hotels electronic key the bedroom in the suite by an intespare phones) and took the elevator to posed to be soon enroute to Paris and records indicate that at 12:26 PM she rior corridor. According to the hotels the lobby. At 12:28 PM the hotel secuthen to Berlin where he had a meeting rity cameras show him departing. He entered 2820, another VIP suite on the electronic key records, which were the following day with German Chansame floor that she had already entered had to go eight blocks to the McCorprovided to DSKs lawyers, Nafissatou cellor Angela Merkel. He could not several times earlier that morning. Then, mick & Schmicks restaurant on Sixth Diallo, a maid, had entered the presihave known that by late afternoon he one to two minutes later, she went back Avenue between 51st and 52nd Street. dential suite (room 2806) between would, instead, be imprisoned in New to the now empty presidential suite. A He was delayed by heavy traffic on 12:06 and 12:07 PM (such records are York on a charge of sexual assault. He few minutes after that, she would then be indicted by a encountered another housegrand jury on seven counts keeper, her supervisor, in the of attempted rape, sexual ascorridor. In the course of their sault, and unlawful imprisconversation, Diallo asked the onment, placed under house supervisor what would happen arrest for over a month, and, if a hotel guest took advantage two weeks before all the of a hotel employee. Initially, charges were dismissed by Diallo told her that this was the prosecutor on August 23, only a hypothetical question; 2011, sued for sexual abuse by but then, when pressed further, the alleged victim. she said that she had been asHe knew he had a serious saulted by the guest in the problem with one of his Blackpresidential suite. The superBerry cell phoneswhich he visor then brought her to the called his IMF BlackBerry. This was the phone he used head of housekeeping, Renata to send and receive texts and Markozani, who reentered the e-mailsincluding for both presidential suite with Diallo personal and IMF business. at 12:42, according to the key According to several sources records, and notified the howho are close to DSK, he had tels security and management received a text message that personnel. At 12:52 PM, Diallo is seen arriving at the hotels morning from Paris from a security office on the ground woman friend temporarily floor, located near the 45th working as a researcher at Street entrance. She is wearthe Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozys center-right politiing a beige uniform, and is Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, in the courtyard of their Paris residence, September 2011 cal party. She warned DSK, accompanied by Renata Marwho was then pulling ahead kozani, whom she towers over. only accurate to the nearest minute).2 of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least Sixth Avenue. The restaurant camera (She is five feet ten inches tall.) Ordinarily, cleaning personnel do not one private e-mail he had recently sent shows that he arrived at 12:54. Shortly thereafter the hotels own enter a room to clean when a guest is from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Camille was with her new boyfriend. security team was augmented by John still in it. According to DSKs account, Sinclair, had been read at the UMP They had a quick meal, and at 2:15 PM, Sheehan, a security expert who is offices in Paris.1 It is unclear how the according to the restaurants surveilhis bags were visible in the foyer when identified on LinkedIn as director of UMP offices might have received this lance cameras, DSK got in another he emerged naked from the bathroom safety and security at Accor, a part of e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF taxi to go to the airport. Almost iminto the interior corridor. At this point, the French-based Accor Group, which BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect mediately, he discovered that his IMF according to his account, he encounowns the Sofitel. Sheehan, who was at BlackBerry was missing. It was the he might be under electronic surveiltered the maid in the corridor by the home in Washingtonville, New York, phone he had arranged to have examlance in New York. He had already bathroom. (The maid, for her part, says that morning, received a call from the ined for bugs in Paris and it was the been warned by a friend in the French she encountered him coming out of the Sofitel at 1:03 PM. He then rushed to the hotel. While en route, according phone that contained the earlier text diplomatic corps that an effort would bedroom.) Phone records show that by to his cell phone records, he called a message warning him about the interbe made to embarrass him with a scan12:13 PM he was speaking to his daughter Camille on his BlackBerry. The call number with a 646 prefix in the United ception of his messages. At 2:16 PM he dal. The warning that his BlackBerry called Camille, who had also just left lasted for forty seconds. States. But from these records neither might have been hacked was therefore the restaurant, on his spare BlackBerry What took place between DSK and the name nor the location of the person all the more alarming. and had her go back to the restaurant the maid in those six to seven intervenhe called can be determined. When I At 10:07 AM he called his wife in Paris on his IMF BlackBerry, and in a to search for it. Camera footage at the ing minutes is a matter of dispute. DNA called the number a man with a heavy conversation that lasted about six minevidence found outside the bathroom restaurant shows her crawling under French accent answered and asked utes told her he had a big problem. He door showed her saliva mixed with his the table. At 2:28 PM she sent him a whom I wanted to speak with at Accor. 3 The man I asked to talk toand text message saying that she could not asked her to contact a friend, Stphane semen. The New York prosecutor conto whom I was not put throughwas find it. So DSK continued on to the Fouks, who could come to his home on cluded that a hurried sexual encounRen-Georges Querry, Sheehans ulairport. the Place des Vosges and who could ter took place and DSKs lawyers have timate superior at Accor and a wellBack at the Sofitel, meanwhile, Nafarrange to have both his BlackBerry admitted as much, while claiming that connected former chief of the French issatou Diallo, the maid he had encounand iPad examined by an expert in what happened was consensual. The anti-gang brigades, who was now head tered in the presidential suite, had told such matters. He had no time to do maid has brought a civil suit claiming of security for the Accor Group. Behotel security that she had been sexuanything about it that morning. He he used force. It is not clear when she fore joining Accor Group in 2003, he ally assaulted by a client in that suite. had scheduled an early lunch with his left the room since key card records do had worked closely in the police with A thirty-two-year-old immigrant from twenty-six-year-old daughter Camille, not show times of exit. What is known Guinea, she had been working at the a graduate student at Columbia, who Sofitel for three years. At 2:30 PM she wanted to introduce him to her new 2 3 For this article, along with court and I had access to the record of only one was shown a photograph of DSK by boyfriend. After that, he had to get to other legal documents, I had access to cell phone used by the Accor Groups the hotels security people. According Sofitel electronic key swipe records, security man, John Sheehan. Neither to the official bill of particularsthe 1 These statements, along with others in time-stamped security camera videoSheehan nor the hotels security direcstatement of the basic facts of the case this article, were confirmed by sources tapes, and records for a cell phone used tor, Adrien Brand, returned my calls. filed by the prosecutorsthe police who prefer to remain anonymous on the day of May 14 by John Sheehan, Through an assistant Brian Yearwood, had apparently not yet fully taken over but are known to the author, who has a security employee of Accor, the comthe hotels chief engineer, said he had the case, even though the encounter shared his information with the editors. pany that owns the Sofitel hotel. no comment.

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Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

The New York Review

Ange Mancini, who is now coordinator for intelligence for President Sarkozy. Querry, at the time that Sheehan was making his call to the 646 number, was arriving at a soccer match in Paris where he would be seated in the box of President Sarkozy. Querry denies receiving any information about the unfolding drama at the Sofitel until after DSK was taken into custody about four hours later.

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whom Sheehan might have alerted was Xavier Graff, the duty officer at the Accor Group in Paris. Graff was responsible that weekend for handling emergencies at Accor Group hotels, including the Sofitel in New York. His name only emerged five weeks later when he sent a bizarre e-mail to his friend Colonel Thierry Bourret, the head of an environment and public health agency, claiming credit for bringing down DSK. After the e-mail was leaked to Le Figaro, Graff described it as a joke (it resulted, however, in his suspension as director of emergencies by the Accor Group). Even jokes can have a basis. In this case the joke was made by the person who was directly responsible for passing on information to his superiors, including the head of security at Accor, RenGeorges Querryinformation that, if acted on by informing the American authorities, could have helped destroy DSKs career. But like Querry, Graff denied receiving any calls or messages from New York until later that evening, telling a French newspaper that the failure to inform him was an incredible miss (loupe). By the time Sheehan was called by the hotel at 1:03 PM, Diallo was seated on a bench in the hotels ground floor service area, just off the service entrance on 45th Street. Behind her was a Dutch door, with the upper half opened, that led to the hotels security office. Surveillance camera footage shows her entering the area with a tall unidentified man at 12:52 PM. She mains there until 2:05 PM. At 12:56, she is joined there by Brian Yearwood, the large, heavy-set man who is the hotels chief engineer. Yearwood had just come down from the presidential suite on the twenty-eighth floor, which he had entered at 12:51, according to the key records. Yearwood remained close to Diallo as she spoke to Adrian Branch, the security chief for the hotel, who remained behind the half-shut door of the security office. She can be seen gesturing with her hands for about four minutes, pointing to different parts of her body over and over again, suggesting she was telling and retelling her story. At 1:28, Sheehan, still on the way to the hotel, sent a text message to Yearwood. And then another text message to an unidentified recipient at 1:30. At 1:31one hour after Diallo had first told a supervisor that she had been assaulted by the client in the presidential suiteAdrian Branch placed a 911 call to the police. Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, the two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for 24

Another person at the Accor Group

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A schematic drawing of the twenty-eighth floor of the Sofitel New York, with the presidential suite, room 2806, that was occupied by Dominique Strauss-Kahn on May 13 and 14. The nearby room 2820 was entered at least three times on May 14 by the Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo.

three minutes. They are then shown standing by the service door leading to 45th Streetapparently waiting for the police to arrivewhere they are joined at 2:04 PM by Florian Schutz, the hotel manager. A minute later, at 2:05 PM, the footage shows two uniformed police officers arriving and then accompanying Diallo to an adjoining office. It is unclear if the police officially took over the case at this time or later. There is so far no explanation for why the security staff had delayed the call to the NYPD that would lead a scandal involving the possible future president of France. What is clear is that they did so just three minutes after receiving a message from Sheehan. Nor is it clear why the two men were celebrating. he police arrived, according to the hotels security camera footage, at 2:05 PM. They then can be seen escorting Diallo to a room across from the security office. There is an unexplained discrepancy here concerning the information in the bill of particulars, which says that at approximately 2:30 PM, a photograph of the defendant

was shown to the witness [i.e., Diallo] by hotel security without police involvement. If so, even after leaving the bench (and video surveillance) and going to a room with the police, she remained in the custody of Sofitel security. I asked both Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne and Deputy Inspector Kim Royster why, according to the bill of particulars, the police were not officially involved at this point, but they declined to comment. More than an hour later, at 3:28 PM, the police took her to St. Lukes Hospital, where she was medically examined and they then formally interviewed her. She described to them a brutal and sustained sexual attack in which DSK locked the suite door, dragged her into the bedroom, and then dragged her down the inner corridor to a spot close to the bathroom doora distance of about forty feetand, after attempting to assault her both anally and vaginally, forced her twice to perform fellatio. After that, she fled the suite. As has been seen, according to the electronic key information, and to the record of DSKs call to his daughter showing him speaking to her at 12:13, we can reasonably conclude that any such actions could
Mike King

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have taken place only within a period of six or seven minutes, between 12:0607 and 12:13, when he called his daughter. At 3:01 PM, as DSK was approaching the airport, he was still attempting to find his missing phone. He attempted to call it from his spare but received no answer. What he did not know was that at 12:51, according to the records of the BlackBerry company, it had been somehow disabled. At 3:29 PM, evidently unaware of what was happening at the Sofitel, he called the hotel from the taxi, saying, according to the police transcript, I am Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I was a guest. I left my phone behind. He then said he was in room 2806. He was asked to give a phone number, so that he could be called back, after 2806 was searched for his phone. When he was called back thirteen minutes later, he spoke to a hotel employee who was in the presence of police detective John Mongiello. The hotel employee falsely told him that his phone had been found and asked where it could be delivered. DSK told him that he was at JFK Airport and that I have a problem because my flight leaves at 4:26 PM. He was reassured that someone could bring it to the airport in time. OK, I am at the Air France Terminal, Gate 4, Flight 23, DSK responded. So the police rushed to the airport. At 4:45 PM, police called DSK off the plane and took him into custody. DSK was then jailed and indicted by a grand jury on seven counts, including attempted rape, sexual abuse, and unlawful imprisonment. The court eventually dropped all the charges against him because the prosecutors found that the complainant, Diallo, had proven to be an untruthful witness. They wrote in the motion for dismissal that the nature and number of the complainants falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt. They said that she has given irreconcilable accounts of what happened, and had lied not only to the prosecutors but under oath to the grand jury about her whereabouts after the encounter. She stated that she had hid in the hall after leaving the presidential suite, and entered no other room on the twenty-eighth floor until she told another maid about the attack (which was approximately fifteen minutes later). When asked why she had not used her pass key to go into another room, she said they all had Do Not Disturb signs on the door. After her grand jury testimony, prosecutors discovered that this was false when the hotel belatedly provided them with the electronic key records showing that Diallo had entered room 2820 at 12:26 PM, after her encounter with DSK. The same record also showed that she had also entered room 2820 prior to her encounter with DSK at a time when the occupant had not checked out and may have been in the room. Why she concealed visiting 2820 was inexplicable to the prosecutors, who noted in their motion for dismissal that if she had mentioned her visits to 2820, it would have been declared part of the crime scene and searched by the police. But she did not do so.

RESTAURANT

Mike King

A schematic drawing of the first floor of the Sofitel New York, based on plans registered with the New York City Department of Buildings

FRONT DESK

Nor were DSKs lawyers able to find

an explanation. When they attempted to learn the identity of the occupant of 2820, Sofitel refused to release it on grounds of privacy. Given Diallos conflicting accounts, all that we really The New York Review

know about what happened in the nearby Room 2820 is that Diallo went there both before and after her encounter with DSK and then omitted the latter visit from her sworn testimony to the grand jury. We still do not know if there was anyone in 2820 when she entered it again following the encounter with DSK or if, prior to the police arriving, anyone influenced her to omit mention of Room 2820. The Sofitel electronic key record, which the hotel did not turn over to the prosecutors until the next week, contained another unexplained anomaly. Two individuals, not one, entered DSKs suite between 12:05 and 12:06 PM while he was showering. Each used a different key card entry. The key card used at 12:06 belonged to Diallo; the key card used at 12:05 belonged to Syed Haque, a room service employee who, according to his account, came to pick up the breakfast dishes. If he did so, he would have turned left and gone to the dining room. But Haque has refused to be interviewed by DSKs lawyers, so his precise movements have not been made public. Since the key cards do not register the time of exit, it cannot be determined from them if both parties were in the room at the same time or, for that matter, at the time of Diallos encounter with DSK. DSKs BlackBerry, with its messages, is still missing. Investigations by both the police and private investigators retained by DSKs lawyers failed to find it. While DSK believed he had left it in the Sofitel, the records obtained from BlackBerry show that the missing phones GPS circuitry was disabled at 12:51. This stopped the phone from sending out signals identifying its location. Apart from the possibility of an accident, for a phone to be disabled in this way, according to a forensic expert, required technical knowledge about how the BlackBerry worked. From electronic information that became available to investigators in November 2011, it appears the phone never left the Sofitel. If it was innocently lost, whoever found it never used it, raising the question of by whom and why it was disabled at 12:51. In any case, its absence made it impossible for DSK to checkas he had planned to doto see if it had been compromised. Nor was it possible to verify from the phone itself the report he received on May 14 that his messages were being intercepted. So we cannot confirm the warning to DSK that he was under surveillance on that disastrous day. One vexing mystery concerns the one-hour time gap in reporting the alleged attack on Diallo. After she said that she had been the victim of a brutal and sustained sexual assault, it is hard to understand how the security staff would have ruled out that she might require immediate medical attention. But as has been seen, until 1:31, several minutes after receiving a message from Sheehan, the security staff did not make the 911 call. She did not arrive at St. Lukes Hospital until 3:57 PM, nearly four hours after the alleged attack. We do not know what decisions were made during that one-hour interval or how they influenced what was to 26

later unfold with such dramatic impact. By the time the 911 call was finally made, the hotels management was presumably aware of the political explosion and scandal DSKs arrest would cause. DSK could no longer be a challenger to Sarkozy. Such considerations, and the opportunities they presented, may have had no part whatever in the hotels handling of the situation, but without knowing the content of any messages between the hotel managers in New York and the security staffs in New York or Paris, among others, we cannot be sure. Meanwhile, several mysteries remain. Was there anyone in room 2820 besides Diallo during and after the encounter with DSK? If so, who were they and what were they doing there; and why, in any case, did Diallo deny that shed gone to the room? Because
Bryan Smith/ ZUMA Press/Corbis

The Sofitel hotel, West 44th Street, New York, May 2011

she denied it, the police, according to the prosecutors recommendation for dismissal, did not search 2820 or declare it a crime scene. And where, if it still exists, is the BlackBerry that DSK lost and feared was hacked? All we know for sure is that someone, or possibly an accident, abruptly disabled it from signaling its location at 12:51 PM. DSK himself has not explained why he was so concerned about the possible interception of his messages on this BlackBerry and its disappearance. According to stories in Libration and other French journals on November 11, 2011, DSK sent text messages on a borrowed cell phone to at least one person named in the stillunfolding affair involving the Carleton Hotel in Lille, a scandal in which corporations allegedly provided high-class escort women to government officials. (DSK denies that he was connected to the prostitution ring.) If DSK sent these messages, may he also have received embarrassing messages back on his own BlackBerry that could have been damaging to his reputation and political ambitions? Or his concern could also have proceeded from other matters, such as the sensitive negotiations he was conducting for the IMF to stave off the euro crises. Whatever happened to his phone, and the content on it, his political prospects were effectively ended by the events of that day. The New York Review