Les affaires interdits
For those not familiar with this blog, when it was originally planned in early 2017 (we’re approaching our fourth anniversary of going live, but were already doing dry runs by early March) it had foreseen a regular feature called “Social Lenses.” This was created to allow occasional comment on wider social issues generated by (good, preferably excellent) films or television series. Examples of early forays into this somewhat idiosyncratic genre are here (“Spotlight”), here (“The Florida Project”), and here (“Big Little Lies”).
The feature never really took off, partly because I haven’t seen that many great films since starting the blog (more reading and writing, less viewing), and partly because I haven’t felt especially moved to comment by those films I have seen in the past four years.
But I’ve just completed viewing the four-part series “Room 2806, The Accusation” (Netflix, released December 2020) as a homework assignment for a Zoom meetup every two weeks with a group of friends. It’s one of the best regular get-togethers I participate in, partly due to the conviviality of the group itself and partly due to the fact that we’ve begun identifying “discussion topics” and the latter have led to thought-provoking and lively discussion. The first of these was “The 1619 Project”; the second was “AOC,” and the third is this documentary series.
The tightly-orchestrated, sophisticated (“slick” has too negative a connotation; rather, “Room 2806” is well thought-out and executed, making use of numerous devices repeatedly throughout the 180 minutes of running time), and informative documentary details the events surrounding the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on May 14, 2011 at the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (located at 45 W. 44th St., in the heart of the Theater District).
For those of you who don’t recall the details (and who does? It’s been nearly a decade), Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was then in his fourth year as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, headquartered in Washington, D.C. He’d come to the position following a distinguished and ever-upward trajectory in French politics, advancing from Minister of Industries (1991-1993) to Minister of the Economy, Finance, and Industry (1994-1999). It was generally believed in French Socialist circles that he would be the country’s next President, given the declining popularity of Nicolas Sarkozy (President 2007-2012).
He was in NYC on May 14, and had planned to depart for France and a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel the day the “incident” occurred. On the morning of the 14th, the housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo entered Strauss-Kahn’s room (2806, the Presidential Suite on the 28th floor – $3,000 per night, but DSK had been given a “free” upgrade and was paying the standard room rate of $525). Nine minutes later, Diallo departed the room and went in search of her supervisor. Camera footage from the employees’ work area where she was taken by hotel security after reporting what had happened to her supervisor shows her pacing restlessly, aimlessly. After about an hour (so, around 1:30 that day), hotel security persuaded her to call the police, who arrived almost immediately (the 911 call is included; Strauss-Kahn was not mentioned by name. Rather, he was referred to as one of the “big guests” and the caller refuses to give the name when explicitly asked.
In the meantime, DSK had made a hasty departure from the hotel – so hasty, in fact, that he had forgotten his cell phone – and headed for the Air France lounge at JFK Airport. The fact he’d left his phone behind led to his apprehension – he called Reception to ask about it and police, who had raced to JFK, managed to stop him before his flight’s departure.
The footage most of us remember from those days is replayed – he was arrested, taken to PSA (=Police Service Area) 5 in Harlem (123rd St.), and compelled to do the so-called “perp walk” (something European journalists found inexplicable and outrageous, insulting for a man of his stature). On May 18 he was indicted on seven charges (four felonies, three misdemeanors), including attempted rape, and remanded to Rikers Island, where he remained four days. On June 6 he was arraigned – he pleaded not guilty – and released to house arrest following payment of $1 million cash bail plus a $5 million bond. He spent the next couple months in a Tribecca townhouse which his wife Anne Sinclair rented for $50,000 a month; Sinclair also spent $200,000 a month for security guards, which the judge had required as a condition of granting bail.
Meanwhile, the NYPD SVU had ensured that Diallo was taken to a hospital, that a rape kit was administered, that samples from her clothing (semen was found on her shirt) and photos were taken as evidence (she had bruising on her neck and arms).
Once the Manhattan Prosecutor’s Office took over the investigation, Diallo was grilled over the course of days, in what can only be interpreted in retrospect as an effort not to help her case (which is the Prosecutor’s purported mission as representing “the People”), but to break her. And this they did, despite the fact that the Sex Crimes NYPD officer (Michael Osgood) who initially questioned her at the hotel was convinced her story was credible, especially when considered in light of forensic evidence found in the room’s hallway (semen discovered). Osgood, who speaks on more than one occasion in the documentary, was experienced with sexual assault victims, in contrast to the former NYPD Police Sergeant called in as an investigator for the prosecution, who was conversant with major crimes cases but had no experience with sexual assault cases.
As news began to leak that the victim’s credibility was “collapsing” under questioning by the NYPD – they determined she had lied to the grand jury and on numerous occasions to NYPD regarding the incident on May 14 – Strauss-Kahn was released from house arrest on July 1. The motion to dismiss all charges was granted on August 23 (footage of the dismissal is included). DSK and Anne Sinclair returned to Paris within 10 days, and in September he gave his first interview on French television, stating categorically that sex (in the hallway, with his semen on Diallo’s shirt) was consensual, and that Diallo had lied (implication: to extort a rich client, even though she had no idea who he was). He noted that he had no intention of paying her anything in the civil suit that followed, a suit which was settled out of court in late 2012. He did pay her damages rumored to have been in the amount of $1.5 million, of which $.5 million went in fees to her lawyers.
Nafissatou Diallo was born and grew up in Conakry Guinea, a former French colony that gained its independence in 1958. The official language of the country continues to be French, but around 24 different languages and dialects spoken. During the period when she was being incessantly interrogated by the Prosecutor’s Office, Diallo had at one point requested a Fulani interpreter. She had arrived in the U.S. as an asylum seeker in 2003; it was revealed that she had lied about having been gang-raped on the advice of a lawyer (not always the most scrupulous law-abiding citizens), although there was no reference to the rape in her asylum application. Contemporary sources indicate that she lost pretty much all credibility in prosecutors’ eyes, to the point where they didn’t think they could win the case.
On September 3, 2011 DSK and his wife (who had flown over from Paris early on to support her husband, to whom she remained loyal for another year or so) departed New York, and we were unable to find any indication that he has returned to the U.S. since then.
DSK is a free man but he is not an untainted one. Initially he maintained that what happened in Room 2806 was a set-up by political rivals in Paris who wanted to destroy his candidacy in the upcoming elections. While he later retracted this accusation, he continued to claim that his enemies were “in contact” with the hotel and ensured that the encounter was reported to the police. There is no evidence presented in the documentary that this was so.
Over the course of the summer, as Diallo’s credibility was being eroded (the New York Post played a significant supporting role in the smear campaign), accusations against Diallo went so far as to imply she was a prostitute, and that there was some sort of organized prostitution ring being run out of NYC’s toniest hotels. The NYHTC – her union – responded forcefully to these accusations (there’s a revealing interview with Peter Ward, President of the Hotel Trades Council), even arranging for a busload of hotel attendants (sometimes referred to in the press as “housemaids”) to be present at the court when DSK appeared on June 6.
Today Strauss-Kahn’s political ambitions have collapsed (when he counter-sued Diallo in the civil case she filed against him, his claim was that she had destroyed his career at the IMF and materially impacted his other “professional opportunities,” viz. the presidency). But he is by no means without resources. While his wife did eventually divorce him (they separated in 2012 and the divorce was finalized in 2013), his estimated net worth today is $25 million – quite a jump from the amount noted in the bail hearing a decade ago ($2 million). At his trial in Lille in early 2015, Strauss-Kahn stated that his 2014 earnings for “international business consulting” were 2.4 million pounds ($3.8 million), which would accord well with his net worth today. He has since 2011 continued working as an “international business consultant” for some of America’s favorite countries, including Russia (where he sits on the Board of Directors of the Russian Regional Development Bank), Serbia, Ukraine and briefly, South Sudan.
The political response in France – disbelief, shock, denial – among Strauss-Kahn’s friends and political allies (both Jack Lang and Élisabeth Guigou speak with admiration in the documentary), many of whom he had known since the 1980s, was profound. Friends and colleagues all admitted that he was a compulsive “womanizer” (“un grand séducteur” – somehow, it sounds less slimy and more worldly in French), but no one among his immediate circle could (would?) admit that he engaged in aggressive, violent behavior in the course of his many, many, many liaisons. Anne Sinclair (his third wife, to whom he was married for more than 20 years), a distinguished and successful journalist in her own right, claimed she had no idea of what her husband was (really) like – she seems to have been peripherally aware that he was a womanizer (there’s an implication that she was even a bit proud of his attractiveness to other women), but put up blinders to his other side.
The long and sordid history of that other side began to emerge after DSK’s return to Paris. This side of his personality, while it could not have been unknown (he had accomplices in Europe and Washington), appears not to have been broached in the way that his more “acceptable” seductions of women who moved roughly in his and Ms. Sinclair’s social circles or in those just beneath them were. It’s possible this side was never known to his social equals – it certainly wasn’t acknowledged. It’s also possible that some of his friends and associates did know, but that they maintained a code of silence: “we don’t talk about such matters in polite society.”
The documentary details some of these cases of aggressive sexual encounters, and there are interviews with one complainant, Tristiane Banon, who as a 23-year-old aspiring journalist went in 2002 to interview DSK in an unfurnished house where, she claims, he basically did to her what he did to Diallo ten years later. Banon, who speaks extensively in the documentary, is the daughter of a former political colleague of Strauss-Kahn, Anne Mansouret – who, it turned out, had had an affair with Strauss-Kahn herself unbeknownst to her daughter. Banon revealed what Strauss-Kahn had done to her in 2007 – saying that their encounter turned violent and that she had used the word “rape.” The footage is incorporated in the documentary and it’s shocking – not just for what Banon, who looks even younger than she was at the time, said, but for how she said it and how the other “guests” responded.
In 2015, a far more complex and insidious case, the so-called “Carlton Affair” (named after a luxury hotel in Lille where Strauss-Kahn had never stayed, but where some of the prostitutes he used worked; his name came up in the investigation and thus he became a subject of interest and, eventually, defendant) was tried in Lille with a group of 13 other men who had regularly organized orgies in Paris, Washington, and Brussels (and elsewhere? Madrid is mentioned in one source we read) between 2009 and 2011 (the final “party,” with prostitutes flown to the U.S. by two businessmen in northern France was apparently held just before Strauss-Kahn was arrested in NYC). One of the prostitutes involved in a party in Paris in 2010, Mouna Rabou, speaks at length in the final episode; her testimony is illuminating and heart-breaking.
At the trial held in February 2015, Strauss-Kahn was eventually acquitted (verdict received in June), because it proved impossible to tie him to direct payments to the prostitutes engaged by political cronies and underlings in the various cities where he attended such evenings. He claimed he had no idea the women were prostitutes; rather, they were just “swingers” out to have a good time with a powerful man. But he also (this isn’t in the documentary) “self-assuredly explained his appetite for group sex and how his sexual style was ‘rougher than the average man’.”
So much for the “facts of the case.” In Part II, we consider the forces at play that led to the case against Strauss-Kahn being dropped.