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Is IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn guilty of Rape?
Is IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn guilty of raping hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo? Nafissatou Diallo's version of the events is while Strauss-Kahn was staying at the hotel in New York he assaulted and raped her. Strauss-Kahn's version of the story is he had consensual sex with hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo while he stayed at the hotel in New York. The twist comes when new evidence surfaces eliminating Nafissatou Diallo's credibility. The evidence that came to light is a recorded conversation between Diallo and an Arizona man in prison. In the conversation allegedly Diallo states "this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing." However this is how the conversation is interpreted since it was spoken in Diallo's native language a dialect of Fulani. So this conversation has a possibility of having been misinterpreted. In addition evidence shows Diallo has received large sums of money in her bank account from various states from the Arizona man in prison. Furthermore evidence was discovered Diallo lied to immigration to get her visa by claiming she was gang raped and her husband was tortured and killed by the Guinean Regime. Lastly evidence shows Diallo continued to clean rooms after supposedly being raped. The twist do not stop with Diallo but Strauss-Kahn has evidence which has surfaced with another lady from his past claiming she was assaulted and raped by him. The accuser Tristane Banon states this occurred in her apartment in 2003 when she was doing an interview for a book project. The prosecutors in Paris opened up an investigation into the charges. So with all these twists it is not clear-cut as to what actually happened in the New York hotel room. Please weigh your thoughts and insights here about what you feel happened. Readers give me your opinion on this topic and if you have suggestions for other topics please contact me. Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed yourself and come back. Sources: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-strausskahn-maid- idUSTRE76Q6JR20110727 http://abcnews.go.com/US/dominique-strauss-kahns-accuser-speaks/story? id=14150192 http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/accuser-in-strauss-khan- case-meets-with-prosecutors/ http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/26/us-strausskahn-accuser- idUSTRE76P4FA20110726
Strauss-Kahn’s accuser: Schemer or immigrant survivor?
NEW YORK | Tue Jul 26, 2011 11:42am EDT
(Reuters) – First she was portrayed as a model of virtue who was violated by a rich and powerful man.
Then she was presented as a liar, a schemer associated with criminals in the New York underworld, who may have taken down the next president ofFrance for her own financial gain.
The world remains divided on the hotel maid who accused former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of assaulting her in a New York hotel on May 14, an explosive case which like many sex cases comes down to whose account of the incident you believe.
Nafissatou Diallo, whose story had been told through prosecutors and defense lawyers, gave her own account to the media this weekend in a graphic interview with Newsweek and ABC, saying Strauss-Kahn behaved like a “crazy man.”
It was the first time the widow with a teenage daughter, an immigrant from Guinea in West Africa, had spoken publicly since she alleged Strauss-Kahn emerged naked from the bathroom of his luxury suite and forced her to perform oral sex.
Defense lawyers insist any sex was consensual and called the interview an effort to extract money from Strauss-Kahn.
Diallo’s lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, said she wanted people to know she is not a “shakedown artist or a prostitute.” The illiterate daughter of a Muslim imam, she was working as a cleaner at the luxury Manhattan hotel.
“She is not a whore, she is a good mother,” said Blake Diallo, the Senegalese manager of a Harlem restaurant she once frequented, who is not related to her. “She was a wonderful, caring, hard-working African woman.”
To women’s rights advocates she is a survivor who embodies the immigrant story of fleeing poverty and repression for a better life in America. They also lament how the accuser so easily becomes the accused.
Yet defenders and political supporters of Strauss-Kahn were also handed material they could eagerly latch on to.
Prosecutors hoping to jail Strauss-Kahn for up to 25 years were forced to report troubling information about Diallo’s background. In order to win U.S. asylum she had lied about being gang-raped and she changed details of her story about what happened minutes after her encounter with Strauss-Kahn.
What’s more, the woman appeared to be surrounded by shady characters. The revelations threw the case into disarray, providing Strauss-Kahn’s defense lawyers with ammunition to undermine her credibility should the case ever reach trial.
SHATTERED HOMELAND
According to lawyers for the accuser, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said they had found a recorded telephone conversation after the incident between her and a man detained in an Arizona jail in which she said “words to the effect” that “this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing.”
The precise context of the conversation has been clouded by the difficulties of interpretation of a dialect of Fulani, but they were seen as seriously undermining the prosecution case.
Despite speculation that he might drop the charges, New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance has yet to do so, indicating prosecutors may believe parts of both narratives — that she was a victim but she also has inconvenient facts in her background.
“Poor immigrants of violence often do things to survive … and are sometimes drawn into criminal or unsavory activity and often end up with really poor quality immigration assistance,” said Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the battered women’s services group that has provided services to the accuser.
“She’s typical of so many of the very vulnerable immigrant women in our city.”
Despite Guinea’s ample natural resources, decades of misrule mean its 10 million residents mostly make do on average incomes of around $3 a day.
One of six brothers and sisters, Diallo’s early life was one of limited horizons and expectations. Her home village in the remote Labe region, a hard day’s drive north of Conakry, still has no water, electricity or phone lines. It is reached only after a 30-minute scramble on foot through thick forest.
Her family is of Fula ethnicity, like 40 percent of the population. Her late father was known as a devoted and learned Muslim. Like many West Africans, her family practiced the Tidjiane version of Sunni Islam.
“Here, the girls get married at 16 and the boys at 20. We don’t know anything about that other way of life,” her older brother Mamoudou told Reuters, referring to the Western lifestyle his sister found in New York.
Her own arranged marriage to a distant cousin ended with the death of her husband — the cause is unclear — after which she left her home village in the mid-1990s, traveling to the capital to become a seamstress. Her ties with her family back in the Labe region then appeared to weaken.
Later, in her asylum application, prosecutors said she fabricated and embellished her story, claiming she and her husband were persecuted and harassed by the Guinean regime and her husband was jailed, tortured, deprived of medical treatment and eventually died as a result.
After the encounter with Strauss-Kahn, she told prosecutors she had fabricated the statement with the help of an advisor. Kenneth Thompson, a lawyer representing her, said she volunteered to prosecutors she had lied on her asylum application due to that bad advice.
FROM AFRICA TO THE BRONX
Diallo was a victim of genital mutilation, and she wanted to avoid the same fate for her daughter, Thompson said. Those facts would have been enough to win asylum without the need to invent a story, he said.
“We’ve seen … clients are encouraged to make misrepresentations, even when the true story might be the very strong basis for an immigration claim,” Leidholdt said.
Prosecutors said Diallo was the victim of a rape in Guinea, though not a gang-rape as related in her asylum application.
Within days of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, his advisers worked to collect information about Diallo’s history.
They quickly turned up links with people involved in criminal activities, but it was Manhattan prosecutors who uncovered some of the most damaging information on Diallo, according to William Taylor, one of Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers.
The man she spoke with in the Arizona jail had been arrested for bartering counterfeit designer clothes for marijuana, the New York Times reported.
In addition, the Times said, investigators had found bank records showing deposits of thousands of dollars into her bank account, transferred there from a variety of U.S. states by the jailed man.
Taylor said those details came from the District Attorney’s office and their investigators.
Diallo told Newsweek magazine the man did indeed transfer the money into her account, but she was never told about it and she never spent any of the cash.
Once she moved to New York, she became a regular at Cafe 2115 on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, a magnet for the many French-speaking West Africans who live in Harlem, the largely black section of upper Manhattan.
“These stories of drugs and laundering money, I don’t know her that way. She is not that kind of person,” the restaurateur Diallo said.
She worked at the African American Restaurant Marayway, a Gambian eatery in the Bronx, where she worked serving Gambian food before landing a job at the luxury Sofitel hotel.
Immigrant opinions of the woman are sharply mixed.
“Why would a big man who could be president of France want to spoil his chances by doing such a thing?” asked Ouma Mahamadou, 23, a Nigerian patron of Cafe 2115. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, so she must be lying.”
(Additional reporting by Paula Rogo and Noeleen Walder in New York, Mark Hosenball in London, and Saliou Samb in Conakry, editing by Mark Egan and Sandra Maler)
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=14025305 Paris Prosecutors Probe Strauss-Kahn Accusation By PIERRE-ANTOINE SOUCHARD Associated Press PARIS July 8, 2011 (AP) The Paris prosecutor's office said Friday it has opened a preliminary investigation into accusations by a French writer that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her. The probe comes just as New York prosecutors are weighing whether or not to go ahead with a case in which a chambermaid accused Strauss-Kahn — long considered a top contender for France's presidency — of sexual assault. Tristane Banon filed a criminal complaint this week saying that Strauss-Kahn attacked her in an empty apartment in 2003 during an interview for a book project, struggling with her on the floor as he tried to tear off her clothes. An official in the Paris prosecutor's office said Friday that a preliminary investigation has been opened into the complaint. The official was not authorized to be publicly named because the investigation is under way. The investigation allows investigators to question Banon and those close to her about the eight-year-old incident. It could also allow investigators to question Strauss-Kahn, though most likely not unless and until he returns to France. After the preliminary probe, which could take weeks or months, the prosecutor's office could decide to drop the case or pursue the investigation, which could eventually lead to a trial. Strauss-Kahn quit as head of the International Monetary Fund after a New York hotel maid accused him of attempted rape in May, but questions have surfaced about the maid's credibility.
Poll: Should Gay or Homosexual Marriage be Allowed?
Please give my your opinion into whether you think gay or homosexual marriage should be allowed. This is a very hot topic lately and several states have tried to make it legal for homosexuals to be married. Some have been overturned and are still being fought for. Due to this being such a hot topic I feel it should be discussed.
In my opinion I feel homosexuals should be allowed to be married only for the reason I believe most did not choose to be homosexual but were born this way. So if they are suppose to be homosexual who are we to say no to them being happy and being married. The other issue with why they should be allowed to be married unless people rather make some other law/s is the fact homosexual partners don’t have any of the legal benefits of a married couple no matter how long they are together. So unless we want to give them the benefits of a married couple without being married I don’t see how we can be against them being married.
I know those against it are the conservative in our society who mainly focus their argument against based on religious beliefs. Since most religions are against homosexual relations based on the interpretations of their holy books. They also just love to say that marriage is for a man and woman to come together to have a baby which is not possible from same sex marriages.
This poll list is in random order and does not reflect my preferences. In addition I have no association or recommend any ads that are displayed on voting and results page. To take poll click on link below in blue saying “Take my Poll” and another window or tab will open. This poll includes the following Against, For, Against but for other laws being made giving benefits of a married couple, Not sure. Readers giveme your opinion on this topic and if you have suggestions for other topics please contact me. Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed yourself and come back.
The Real Reason the U.S. Economy is in such Bad Shape
The reason the U.S. Economy is doing so badly is not surprising but sure isn’t really being discussed by media. The source of this plight is the wars the U.S. is involved in. The U.S. is spending One Trillion dollars a year on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This doesn’t include the over 300 Billion Dollars spent on our regular defense budget and doesn’t include our conflict in Libya. Now how can any country do well for such a long period of time as we have been involved in these wars. We have been going on for 10 plus years and we are still losing soldiers. There is definitely a direct correlation with a National Debt and the total cost spent on these wars. Just a few weeks ago the U.S. reached it’s cap on National Debt. This means which maxed out in terms of how much debt we are suppose to acquire and that we aren’t suppose to borrow any longer. The amount of the National Debt was around 14.8 Trillion. If you add up the years of fighting it will get us pretty close to the National Debt and will almost equal it if you tally in amount spent on National Defense. The only solution to improve our economy and the world’s is to end the wars.
Readers give me your opinion on this topic and if you have suggestions for other topics please contact me. Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed yourself and come back.
Libyan Conflict is a Joke and excuse to Dethrone Moammar Gadhafi
The U.S. and NATO are just using the rebels trying to overthrow Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi as an excuse to dethrone him. The U.S. and NATO say they are involved to keep the rebels from being slaughtered without mercy. I say this is crap and to me that is what happens to rebels if they don’t win. If the U.S. was really interested in policing the world they would be involved in half the countries around the world including within the U.S. itself and not just Libya. I read the France and England might have intiated or pushed for getting involved just to show off their fighter jets that are in contention for a military contract by India. These are the only two jets they are flying over Libya just the ones that are up for contract. France and England just used attack helicopters to take out some targets in Libya. You can’t tell me the U.S. and NATO aren’t supporting the rebels and helping them to win. Without all this support from the U.S. and NATO the rebels would of been done.
Readers give me your opinion on this topic and if you have suggestions for other topics please contact me. Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed yourself and come back.
Men and Women Relationships and Everything Else 