A New Book on DSK Is Sympathetic and Supportive of His Accuser

John Solomon. Photograph courtesy of the Packard Media Group.

Do you remember DSK? Of course you do. The trials and tribulations of
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former head of the IMF, are a scandal story that keep on giving. Last week marked a year since he was arrested
after a maid at New York’s Sofitel hotel,
Nafissatou Diallo, claimed Strauss-Kahn raped her in his hotel suite. That arrest dashed any hopes he had of becoming a presidential candidate
in France.

Diallo said he attacked her when she arrived at suite
2806 to clean what she thought was an empty room. DSK said she took
advantage of him and the sex was consensual. He was arrested
and charged with sexual assault and attempted rape and held under
house arrest through the summer, until New York prosecutors
dropped the case in late August. They said there were inconsistencies
in Diallo’s testimony.

The events of last summer—from what happened in the hotel suite to the behind-the-scenes in the prosecutor’s office—are the
focus of
DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique-Strauss-Kahn. The author is
John Solomon, the former executive editor of the
Washington Times, who covered the DSK-Diallo story for
Newsweek. He now runs the
Washington Guardian.

For would-be students of the New York incident, it is a
detailed, though sometimes repetitive, retelling of the story and
paints a sympathetic and strong case for Diallo. It also gives
interesting context to additional sex charges that have landed
on DSK since the case was dropped and he returned to his native
France. These charges include allegations of a prostitution
ring that operated in France and Washington.

We caught up with Solomon for an update on Strauss-Kahn.

What is DSK’s legal status right now?

Right now he’s under investigation in France in connection with a prostitution ring that ran out of Lille and may have stretched
as far as DC and the W Hotel.

Is the connection to the W Hotel in DC confirmed?

The judicial documents in France say it went all the
way to the W. If you believe them, then yes. This week there was a new
development. Two or three women who claim to have been sex
slaves in that ring alleged that DSK forced them into a series
of nonconsensual sexual acts.

Has anybody specified the nature of these sexual acts?

The details in France are pretty gory.

Do they indicate aggression?

Yes.

What has Strauss-Kahn said?

DSK has already been interviewed once; he said he does not believe any aggressive criminal behavior occurred, and he was not
aware that the women were prostitutes or being paid.

Will there be a civil trial in his case involving the New York hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo?

In the Bronx, where she lives, Diallo has sued DSK for
damages in civil court. DSK tried to get out of that lawsuit by
claiming
he had immunity. The judge has rejected that claim and ordered
the trial to go forward. Both sides are now in the discovery
phase. As part of the discovery phase, DSK last week
countersued Diallo for $1 million, accusing her of making up the story.

Do you think there will be a civil trial?

Part of the reason DSK sued is to try to get leverage
and reach a settlement with her. She doesn’t have any proceeds. She
doesn’t have a million dollars. One of the things we have
learned is that right in the middle of the criminal case, DSK’s
lawyers and the lawyers for Diallo were secretly negotiating a
settlement. DSK asked, “What would it cost to settle?” That
may paint a picture for how this will end.

If there is a civil trial, will DSK’s lawyers put him on the stand?

He may not have a choice [due to parameters of a civil trial]. When a skilled lawyer like
Alan Dershowitz outlines how he might interrogate DSK, you see what DSK might be in for.

Has the Sofitel stood behind Diallo?

[The hotel’s] attorney,
Lanny Davis, has been strongly supportive of Diallo to get justice. They believe she deserves her day in court. I think Lanny believes
Diallo’s story matched the forensic evidence. The Sofitel has kept her on the payroll.

Based on your reporting, what do you think happened in that Sofitel hotel room?

One of the most important revelations to me personally
is something that didn’t take a lot of investigating. When DSK gave
an interview to his biographer—for the book that offered
explanations for the case—he admitted that when Diallo first saw
him she tried to flee the room and he stopped her. In the US
Court of law, “flight of fear” is a dispositive piece of evidence
that something may not have been consensual. I know from DSK’s
own lawyers that they are very concerned about that admission.

Has anything gone his way, other than the New York prosecutor’s office letting him off the hook?

No. He’s had a very difficult time. His first
interviews in France to rehabilitate his image did anything but and may
have
dug him into a deeper hole, legally. A lot of the things he did
as soon as he got back to France may have been counterproductive.
Every time he makes a statement about one of his actions he
seems to incriminate himself. That’s one of the challenges his
lawyers face.

How do you assess the actions of New York prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr.? Did he do the right thing dropping the case, or did
he chicken out?

I thought I knew everything about this case from
covering it as it happened, but in writing the book I came to discover
that
I knew hardly anything. Everything I knew from the outside was
different on the inside. One of the things I learned in re-reporting
the story afterward is that the prosecutors made some very
significant investigative mistakes in the first 72 hours of the
case.

So would you call the New York prosector’s office dysfunctional?

That’s a very big word. It’s an editorial word, and I’m not an editorial writer. I would say the district attorney’s office
admitted to me they made substantial mistakes at the beginning of the case. One other revelation is that
Cy Vance packed up the court materials and went up to Martha’s Vineyard and asked
Linda Fairsten to help him write the decision
about dropping the case. It shows they saw this as a political decision.
He took a legal process
and asked an author and novelist to juice it up and tell a
story. The prosecutors wanted to make it look like it was Diallo’s
fault and not the prosecutor’s.

What’s the biggest piece of misinformation to come out of the Diallo case?

The front-page story that ran in the
New York Times—it

stated that there was a phone conversation the day after the
incident during which Diallo talked to a friend who was a prisoner
and that they talked about making money on DSK. That story
changed the court of public opinion about Diallo. That day she
went from being a sympathetic woman who’d been attacked to
being a scheming con artist. But when the tapes of the phone
conversation
were openly played for prosecutors, well after the
New York Times story, no such conversation happened.
There was a conversation two days after the hotel incident, and it’s not
Diallo raising
the question of money, it’s the prisoner. Diallo says, “No, no,
no, that’s not for me. This is for the lawyers to handle.”
Someone in the prosecutor’s office leaked it, and someone at
the
New York Times didn’t check it out. Too often on this story the reporters were too glad to be first and hoped to be right.

Does DSK have gainful employment, or is he living off of his wife, Anne Sinclair?

I don’t know of any employment he has. He may have some consulting agreements, but none I’m aware of.

Who is paying his legal bills?

I assume he and his wife are paying out of their own resources. She comes from an enormous amount of wealth. I can only imagine
the legal bills are in the millions of dollars, if not the tens of millions.

Do those close to the couple believe Sinclair knew about his private life and looked the other way?

You know, I didn’t go too much into the marriage. I
thought that was off-limits to me. But I did have someone close to DSK
say that if you only accept what DSK has said in public, then
he’s admitted to forcibly trying to kiss a journalist, he’s
admitted to targeting a subordinate at the IMF, with whom he
was having an affair, and to within five seconds of meeting Diallo
feeling it was okay to have casual sex with her, a woman he’d
never met before. That’s if you only take his account.

Has Sinclair said anything?

She wrote one letter saying she stood by her man. Other than that, she’s been very quiet. Her career has risen as his has
fallen. She’s now the editor of Huffington Post in Paris and one of the most popular women in France.

Where is Diallo today? What is she doing? How is she earning a living?

She still suffers from a shoulder injury that she
alleges happened in the attack. To the best of my knowledge, she lives
at
her home and does not work and waits for the resolution of the
civil case. She wants to get justice. She and her lawyers are
just waiting out the long game.