OFFICER DARREN WILSON CALLS FOR "PEACE" IN FERGUSON:
SAY WHAT?? DIDN'T HE CREATE THIS CHAOS??
The same Adult Man who pumped 8 Bullets into an Unarmed 18-yr old Big BLACK Kid and left this BLACK kid's body lying in the Street for hours, just because WILSON felt this BLACK Kid did not move out of the Street quickly enough.........
Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi, convicted last week of a hate crime for spying on his gay roommate’s date, regrets his “dumb kid” actions, but told ABC News today that he takes “comfort” in the belief that his webcam peeking is not the reason Tyler Clementi jumped to his death.
Ravi, 20, of Plainsboro, N.J., spoke about the case just days after a New Jersey jury convicted him of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, witness tampering and hindering arrest for using a webcam to peek at Clementi’s date in their college dorm room on Sept. 19, 2010 and encouraging others to spy during a second date, on Sept. 21, 2010.
Ravi was not charged in connection with Clementi’s death.
“Even though I wasn’t the one who caused him to jump off the bridge, I did do things wrong and I was stupid about a lot of stuff,” Ravi said in an exclusive broadcast interview with “20/20″ co-anchor Chris Cuomo.
Ravi, who was 18 at the time, was initially rattled by Clementi’s death, which the press depicted as the result of cyber bullying.
He asked himself, “Is this because of me?” Ravi told Cuomo.
But Ravi said that what he learned about his freshman roommate during the course of legal proceedings — including information that hasn’t been made public — convinced him that the 18-year-old took his life for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with Ravi and his webcam.
“The more and more I found out, it would be kind of obnoxious of me to think that I could have this profound effect on him,” Ravi said.
At another point he added, “After all this time and reading his conversations and how and what he was doing before, I really don’t think he cared at all.
I feel like I was an insignificant part to his life. That’s giving me comfort now.”
Ravi also pointed out that Clementi left behind a note, and that its contents have never been made public.
“The fact that we weren’t allowed to read it, that they said it didn’t have anything to do with this, that gave me comfort also because I figured if it has nothing to do with me…it must have been something else that was going on,” he said.
“He didn’t even care about this… He had bigger problems in his life,” he said.
Ravi, alerted by his dorm resident adviser that Clementi was aware of his spying and wanted a room change, sent Clementi a text and an email apologizing. That text was sent about the same time that Clementi jumped off the bridge.
“What is frustrating was I never knew if he got my text or the e-mail that I sent.
It was very frustrating to think I didn’t get a chance to say anything to him. To this day, I just say you know what, I’ll just think he read it and he got it and I’m going to accept that as that’s what happened. …At least he had to hear what I had to say.” Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced May 21 and could face five to 10 years in prison.
As an Indian citizen who is in the U.S. on a green card, Ravi could also face deportation.
Despite the hate crime conviction, Ravi maintains his innocence. He said he never hated Clementi and is not homophobic. That’s why, he said, he turned down prosecutors when they offered a plea deal that included no jail time in exchange for admitting to charges of intimidation against Clementi.
“I had to go up there in front of a judge under oath and say I intimidated Tyler because of sexual orientation — (to say that) I did this because I had this hate for gay people,” he said. “I don’t hate gay people.”
It is believed Clementi learned about his roommate’s spying over Ravi’s Twitter account, on which Ravi posted messages about the incidents.
The first time, Ravi said, he and a friend watched Clementi and his date kissing for just few seconds from another dorm room before quickly shutting it down.
The second time, Ravi said, he planned to let a friend watch the webcam feed, and through a Twitter post he also let other friends know about his plans. But he later decided against it and turned the camera away from Clementi’s bed, he told Cuomo.
During Ravi’s trial, the prosecutor rejected Ravi’s claim to have turned off his computer and turning the webcam away, arguing that it was Clementi who shut it off.
Ravi told Cuomo that his actions were never intended to hurt or shame Clementi and that the Twitter posts were just a way to keep in touch with his own friends and let them know what was going on in his life.
“Looking back, I was very self-absorbed with the whole thing. It was never, ‘What if Tyler finds out, how’s he going to feel about it?’” he said. “…I was 18, I was stupid, I wouldn’t think about my actions beyond a minute into a future. I was a dumb kid not thinking about it.”
Despite media depictions of Clementi and his suicide, Ravi said he believes the teen wasn’t fragile.
“Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s automatically fragile and can’t deal with anything,” he said.
While Ravi believes he should face some punishment, that punishment shouldn’t include jail, he said.
“So much worse happens,” he said. “Kids actually get bullied and actually go through stuff much worse than this. I understand why people feel the need to punish me.
Bad stuff happens and they need to set an example, but it’s unfortunate this has to be the case where this happens.”
Ravi said he feels he’s been taken advantage of.
“The people that are fighting for gay rights, they have a just cause. I think this kind of detracts from their cause,” he said. “This is something people can point to and say, ‘You guys are going overboard.’ I think it’s bad for them.”
A phone call from slain black teenager Trayvon Martin to his girlfriend seconds before he was shot dead by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain "blows ... out of the water" the shooter's self-defense claim and he should be arrested "right now," a lawyer for Martin's family said today.
Attorney Benjamin Crump spoke after ABC News reported exclusively the existence of a phone call between Martin and his girlfriend, which detailed the last terrifying moments of Martin's life as he was pursued, accosted and shot dead by George Zimmerman.
Police accepted Zimmerman's claim of self-defense and have charged him with no crime.
"This young lady connects the dots," said Crump. "Arrest George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin in cold blood, today.
"We don't understand how he's not arrested. The family worries that the more time passes it will be swept under the rug," the lawyer said.
Martin's death Feb. 26 has stirred national outrage and protests, partly prompting the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the FBI to open an investigation into the case.
Florida State Attorney Norm Wolfinger announced today that he had ordered an "expeditious review" of the investigation conducted by the Sanford Police Department, and that he would be "utilizing the investigative resources of the Seminole County Grand Jury, which will be called to session" next month.
ABC News was there exclusively as the 16-year-old girl told Crump about the last moments of the teenager's life. Martin had been talking to his girlfriend all the way to the store where he bought Skittles and a tea. The phone was in his pocket and the earphone in his ear, Crump said.
"He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man," Martin's friend said. "I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run, but he said he was not going to run."
Eventually, he would run, said the girl, thinking that he'd managed to escape. But suddenly the strange man was back, cornering Martin.
"Trayvon said, 'What are you following me for,' and the man said, 'What are you doing here.' Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the head set just fell. I called him again, and he didn't answer the phone."
The line went dead. Besides screams heard on 911 calls that night as Martin and Zimmerman scuffled, those were the last words he said.
Trayvon's phone logs, also obtained exclusively by ABC News, show the conversation occurred five minutes before police first arrived on the scene. Crump said the girl's identity was being withheld because "her parents are gravely concerned about her health and her safety." Her parents asked that only an attorney be allowed to ask her questions.
Martin's father, Tracey Martin, and mother, Sybrina Fulton, listened to the call, along with ABC News, ashen-faced.
"He knew he was being followed and tried to get away from the guy, and the guy still caught up with him," Tracey Martin said. "And that's the most disturbing part. He thought he had got away from the guy, and the guy backtracked for him."
The girl was so distraught after the killing that she spent a night in the hospital, the lawyer said.
"She was really traumatized over this. They were dating. ... It's a situation where to know you were the last person to talk to the young man who was one of the most special persons in the world to you," Crump said.
The lawyer said he would give the details of the phone call to the federal investigation.
"We're going to turn this over to the Justice Department because the family does not trust the Sanford Police Department to have anything to do with the investigation," said Crump.
Zimmerman killed Martin as Martin walked back to his father's fiance's home after stepping out to buy snacks during the NBA All-Star Game. After weeks of relentless pressure, the Sanford Police Department at last released emergency and nonemergency calls placed during the attack.
"These a**holes always get away," Zimmerman said in a call to a nonemergency number.
Dispatcher: "Are you following him?"
Zimmerman: "Yeah."
Dispatcher: "We don't need you to do that."
An altercation soon ensued. A few moments later a torrent of 911 calls flooded in and Martin was killed by a single bullet. Zimmerman claimed self-defense and has yet to be arrested, stoking outrage and claims of prejudice against the police department.
"When George Zimmerman is arrested, tried and convicted I will get a little rest," Tracey Martin said.
Nearly half a million people have signed an online petition on change.org urging law enforcement officials to step in and arrest Zimmerman, who violated major parts of the Neighborhood Watch Manual, which states "It should be emphasized to members that they do not possess police powers. And they shall not carry weapons or pursue vehicles."
There are about 22,000 registered watch groups nationwide, and Zimmerman was not part of a registered group, which police were not aware of at the time of Martin's killing, said Chris Tutko, the director of the National Neighborhood Watch program.
Protests have played out in the Florida town all week with a large gathering expected Thursday.
Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is dropping out of the Republican presidential contest, after a disappointing third place finish in the Iowa Straw Poll yesterday.
“We needed to get some lift to continue on and have a pathway forward,” Pawlenty said this morning in an exclusive interview on “This Week.” "That didn’t happen, so I’m announcing this morning on your show that I’m going to be ending my campaign for president.”
Pawlenty finished with 2,293 votes, giving him 14 percent of the total ballots cast – more than 2,500 votes behind winner Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) who finished with 28 percent of the vote, and runner-up Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who was close behind with 27 percent.
The former Minnesota governor was reportedly planning to spend a total of around $1.5 million on his Iowa campaign from his launch in late May through mid-August.
Despite better resources and organization in Iowa, Pawlenty was only able to beat fourth-place finisher Rick Santorum by just over 600 votes.
Pawlenty sent out an email to supporters last night titled, “Just the Beginning” congratulating Bachmann on the straw poll win, but vowing to continue his campaign.
“As I've said all along, we needed to show progress to do well, and we did just that. This is a long process to restore America -- we are just beginning, and I'm eager for the campaign,” the email to supporters read.
But the weak showing at the Iowa Straw Poll proved to be too large a blow for the campaign to continue.
Let's Hear It For Nafissatou Diallo! Alleged Rape Victim Of Former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Ms. Diallo's Decision To Come Forth To The Public, Defend Her Name & Give An Extremely Detailed Account Of What Happened In DSK's Lavish Manhattan Hotel Room Has Garnered Her Much Support From Women & Common, Everyday Citizens Well Aware Of How Frequently People With Great Wealth Are Allowed To Simply Walk Away After Committing Crimes.
I Admire Ms. Diallo For Boldly Speaking Out Despite The Manhattan D.A.'s Office Attempt To Destroy Her Character.
Had She Not Come Forth To The Public Soon, Cyrus Vance's Office Would Have Totally Destroyed Her & Dismissed The Case Like Yesterday.
Just Because Ms. Diallo Is A Victim Of Life's Circumstances, Does NOT Mean She's A Liar Or Gold Digger!
The lawyer for the hotel maid who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault tells The Daily Beast that tape recordings in the possession of prosecutors capture her describing her alleged attack to an incarcerated friend less than 24 hours after it occurred in a manner consistent with what she told police and prosecutors.
The tapes also show a much different conversation about lawyers and money than what was leaked by authorities earlier this month in a newspaper report, attorney Kenneth Thompson said late Wednesday night after listening to the audio recordings for the first time.
Thompson and the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, 32, met Wednesday with the New York District Attorney’s Office for the first time in nearly a month after the relationship between the alleged victim and prosecutors fell apart over questions about her credibility.
The meeting came just days after Diallo described the attack in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK.
Strauss-Kahn was the head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for French president before Diallo accused him of attacking her and forcing her to have oral sex after she entered his luxury suite to clean it May 14 at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan.
After being arrested, Strauss-Kahn resigned his IMF post and has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault and attempted rape in a case that has fascinated two continents and taken several dramatic turns.
After steadfastly standing by Diallo, prosecutors disclosed late last month they had serious reservations about her credibility after learning she lied to them about an earlier rape in her home country of Guinea, filed a false tax return, and lied on her application seeking asylum in the United States.
During an eight-hour session Wednesday, the prosecutors grilled Diallo about her conduct and contacts after the alleged attack, and they allowed her to listen for the first time to a tape-recorded conversation she had 24 hours after the alleged attack with Amara Tarawally, an illegal immigrant convicted on drug charges and being held in an Arizona detention center.
The call became a critical and tantalizing piece of evidence in the case after The New York Times reported July 1 that law-enforcement sources claimed the tape captured Diallo making a comment to the effect that her alleged attacker was rich and she knew what she was doing. The leak has since been used to suggest that Diallo may have schemed with her incarcerated friend to make money off Strauss-Kahn.
Diallo and Tarawally, in interviews with , also disputed the leaked version of the call.
Thompson said the tape was played Wednesday for Diallo in her native Fulani language and an interpreter explained what was on it. In all, the imprisoned friend called Diallo at least three times in the aftermath of the attack, according to Thompson.
“The tape they played today does not capture Nafi Diallo being recording as saying, ‘He has a lot of money and I know what to do,’ as was leaked to The New York Times,” Thompson said. “Instead it shows there were at least three calls over several days.
“In the first call on the day after the attack, Ms. Diallo clearly reported to her friend in prison that ‘a man tried to rape me on my job. He is big and powerful. I did not know who he was when he attacked me. Because he couldn’t take off my clothes, he put his penis in my mouth.’ And she explained she tried to stop him,” the lawyer said in an interview.
Thompson said that in a later call, the prisoner called back to check on his friend after learning more about the man who allegedly attacked her. During that call, there were discussions about Strauss-Kahn’s wealth and the fact that Diallo had gotten a lawyer, but the quote attributed to Diallo in the leaked report was not on the tape, he said.
At one point, the tape shows Diallo learned after the fact that the man she accused was politically powerful and wealthy. She also acknowledged hiring an attorney, Thompson said.
“Later in the call the prisoner makes a statement like ‘you could get money from this.’ I take this to mean he was referring to a lawsuit,” Thompson explained as he related what the translator told him was on the tape. “Nafi Diallo’s first reaction is ‘wait, wait, wait,’ suggesting she wasn’t worried about that. She then makes a comment like ‘he can deal with it,’ which I took to mean her lawyer could deal with the issue.”
Thompson said he was angry after learning the tape recordings are different from what was leaked and that he conveyed his concerns to prosecutors during Wednesday’s meetings.
“For nearly a month, information has been leaked to the media that falsely portrays Ms. Diallo as scheming to take Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s money a day after he attempted to rape her,” Thompson said. “But what I heard today shows that Ms. Diallo has been telling the truth from the very beginning, that she was sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn while doing her job at the Sofitel.”
Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment late Wednesday. They are continuing to investigate the evidence in the case as they try to determine whether to proceed to trial despite their concerns about the maid’s credibility or drop the charges. A decision is expected in weeks.
Nafissatou Diallo continued her transformation from anonymous accuser in a headline-grabbing criminal case to a public figure, making a brief statement on Thursday afternoon at a Brooklyn church.
Ms. Diallo’s appearance came just days after she first revealed her identity to the public, and the day after she walked past reporters to discuss the case with lawyers at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. While brief, her comments suggested that she was prepared to be a highly visible presence as the case moves toward possible resolution in the coming weeks.
Before a throng of journalists and supporters from her native Guinea, Ms. Diallo, who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault, thanked supporters and spoke about her case in the lobby of a megachurch in East New York, Brooklyn, shortly after noon.
“I’m here because I had people call me a lot of bad names,” Ms. Diallo said softly at the Christian Cultural Center on Flatlands Avenue. “A lot of things they said about me was not true.”
Before being introduced by the Rev. A.R. Bernard, senior pastor at the center, Ms. Diallo, 32, dressed in a dark suit, rubbed her fingers together slowly, blinking often as she gazed out the windows of the lobby, past the bank of cameras and reporters.
“Me and my family, we are going through a lot,” she said. “We cry every day.”
Ms. Diallo, a housekeeper at a Midtown hotel, made her accusation in May against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, but has watched the case crumble around questions of her credibility. She said her 15-year-old daughter had seen her crying recently, prompting a plea from the girl.
“She said: ‘Please stop crying. Be strong for me,” Ms. Diallo said at the church. “I told her, ‘I will be strong for you and for every other woman in the world.’”
Ms. Diallo, working without a script or notes, spoke for less than five minutes at the event on Thursday and did not take questions from reporters before being escorted from the lectern. Her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, and other supporters remained at the microphone and spoke with reporters, as did Mr. Bernard.
Khadijah Shakur, a member of the New Black Panther Party, was among the roughly two dozen supporters who joined Ms. Diallo near a small stage in the lobby, assembled behind red velvet rope.
“She is being blamed, but she is the victim,” Ms. Shakur said before the news conference.
Ms. Diallo broke her public silence last week, granting interviews to Newsweek and ABC News.
At another prominent house of worship on the other side of Brooklyn, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry stood in the pulpit of the House of the Lord Church on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill and called for prosecutors to aggressively pursue charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn.
“I urge District Attorney Cyrus Vance not to drop the case but to pursue truth and justice and let the chips fall where they may,” Mr. Daughtry told a handful of reporters in an otherwise empty house.
In meetings on Wednesday at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, Ms. Diallo and her lawyer, Mr. Thompson, listened to recordings of conversations Ms. Diallo had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizona prison after the alleged attack.
Last month, law enforcement officials told Mr. Thompson and The New York Times that Ms. Diallo could be heard saying on the tape “words to the effect of: ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’ ” After hearing the recordings on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson said his client’s statements, which were made in her native language, Fula, had been mischaracterized.
The maid hovered in the suite’s large living room, just inside the entrance. The 32-year-old Guinean, an employee of the Sofitel hotel, had been told by a room-service waiter that room 2806 was now free for cleaning, “Hello? Housekeeping,” the maid called out again. No reply. The door to the bedroom, to her left, was open, and she could see part of the bed. She glanced around the living room for luggage, saw none. “Hello? Housekeeping.” Then a naked man with white hair suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere.
That’s how Nafissatou Diallo describes the start of the explosive incident on Saturday, May 14, that would forever change her life—and that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and, until that moment, the man tipped to be the next president of France. Now the woman known universally as the “DSK maid” has broken her public silence for the first time, talking for more than three hours with NEWSWEEK at the office of her attorneys, Thompson Wigdor, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue.
“Nafi” Diallo is not glamorous. Her light-brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened, and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure. When her face is in repose, there is an opaque melancholy to it. Working at the Sofitel for the last three years, with its security and stability, was clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have, after years braiding hair and working in a friend’s store in the Bronx as a newcomer from Guinea in 2003.
Some of Diallo’s most upbeat moments in the interview came when she recounted the small promotions and credits available at the Sofitel for a job done well. She was supposed to clean 14 rooms a day for a wage of $25 an hour plus tips, according to her union. It’s an achievement, Diallo said, to get a whole floor of your own because it saves the time wasted going up and down in the elevator to clean random individual rooms. Another maid had gone on maternity leave in April, Diallo said, and she’d gotten the 28th floor. “I keep that floor,” said Diallo. “I never had a floor before.” When every door has a “Do Not Disturb” notice, maids save precious minutes by going to the hall closet and quickly refilling their cleaning carts with soap, towels, and other amenities. Diallo’s eyes lit up talking about the routine and about her colleagues. “We worked as a team,” she said. “I loved the job. I liked the people. All different countries, American, African, and Chinese. But we were the same there.”
Occasionally as Diallo talked, she wept, and there were moments when the tears seemed forced. Almost all questions about her past in West Africa were met with vague responses. She was reluctant to talk about her father, an imam who ran a Quranic school out of the family home in rural Guinea. Her husband died of “an illness,” she said. So did a daughter who was 3 or 4 months old—she wasn’t sure. Diallo was raped by two soldiers who arrested her for a curfew violation at night in Conakry, the Guinean capital. When they had finished with her, they released her the next morning, she said, but made her clean up the scene of the assault. At first she said she couldn’t recall what year that happened, but later she said it was 2001. Diallo had managed to get her surviving daughter, now 15, out of Africa and to the United States “for a better life,” she said. But precisely how that happened was not a subject she or her lawyers would explore. Again, her eyes stared downward, welling with tears.
When Diallo reached the point of her alleged assault in the Sofitel, however, her account was vivid and compelling. As she told NEWSWEEK, she had used up a lot of time waiting for guests to check out of room 2820 before she cleaned it. Then she saw the room-service waiter taking the tray out of 2806, one of the hotel’s presidential suites. The waiter said it was empty. But still she decided to check. This is her account.
“Hello? Housekeeping.” Diallo looked around the living room. She was standing facing the bedroom in the small entrance hall when the naked man with white hair appeared.
“Oh, my God,” said Diallo. “I’m so sorry.” And she turned to leave. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. But he was like “a crazy man to me.” He clutched at her breasts. He slammed the door of the suite.
Diallo is about 5 feet 10, considerably taller than Strauss-Kahn, and she has a sturdy build. “You’re beautiful,” Strauss-Kahn told her, wrestling her toward the bedroom. “I said, ‘Sir, stop this. I don’t want to lose my job,’” Diallo told NEWSWEEK. “He said, ‘You’re not going to lose your job.’” An ugly incident with a guest—any guest—could threaten everything Diallo had worked for. “I don’t look at him. I was so afraid. I didn’t expect anyone in the room.”
“He pulls me hard to the bed,” she said. He tried to put his penis in her mouth, she said, and as she told the story she tightened her lips and turned her face from side to side to show how she resisted. “I push him. I get up. I wanted to scare him. I said, ‘Look, there is my supervisor right there.’” But the man said there was nobody out there, and nobody was going to hear.
Diallo kept pushing him away: “I don’t want to hurt him,” she told us. “I don’t want to lose my job.” He shoved back, moving her down the hallway from the bedroom toward the bathroom. Diallo’s uniform dress buttoned down the front, but Strauss-Kahn didn’t bother with the buttons, she said. He pulled it up around her thighs and tore down her pantyhose, gripping her crotch so hard that it was still red at the hospital, hours later. He pushed her to her knees, her back to the wall. He forced his penis into her mouth, she said, and he gripped her head on both sides. “He held my head so hard here,” she said, putting her hands to her cranium. “He was moving and making a noise. He was going like ‘uhh, uhh, uhh.’ He said, ‘Suck my’—I don’t want to say.” The report from the hospital where Diallo was taken later for examination notes that “she felt something wet and sour come into her mouth and she spit it out on the carpet.”
“I got up,” Diallo told NEWSWEEK. “I was spitting. I run. I run out of there. I don’t turn back. I run to the hallway. I was so nervous; I was so scared. I didn’t want to lose my job.”
Diallo says she hid around the corner in the hallway near the service lobby and tried to compose herself. “I was standing there spitting. I was so alone. I was so scared.” Then she saw the man come out of 2806 and head for the elevator. “I don’t know how he got dressed so fast, and with baggage,” she said. “He looked at me like this.” She inclin-ed her head and stared straight ahead. “He said nothing.”
The entire incident had taken no more than 15 minutes, and maybe much less. According to a source familiar with the phone records, nine minutes after Diallo entered the room, Strauss-Kahn made a call to his daughter.
The maid had left her cleaning supplies in room 2820 when she went to check on Strauss-Kahn’s suite. Now she retrieved them and returned to the suite in which, she says, she had just been attacked. Disoriented, she seems to have sought some kind of solace in resuming her routine. “I went to the room I have to clean,” she explained. But she couldn’t think how or where to start. “I was so, so, so—I don’t know what to do.” Prosecutors, losing faith in Diallo’s credibility, would later raise an issue about this sequence of events. They said she told the grand jury that after the attack she hid in the hallway, but subsequently changed her story to say she cleaned room 2820 and then began to clean the DSK suite. She disputes that she changed her story, and hotel room-access records support what she told NEWSWEEK.
Many aspects of Diallo’s account of the alleged attack are mirrored in the hospital records, in which doctors observed five hours afterward that there was “redness” in the area of the vagina where she alleges Strauss-Kahn grabbed her. The medical records also note she complained of “pain to left shoulder.” Weeks later, doctors reexamined the shoulder and found a partial ligament tear, she said.
If there is one inconsistency for defense lawyers to dwell on in the hospital records, it is a passage that says her attacker got dressed and left the room, and “said nothing to her during the incident.” In her interview with police and her account to NEWSWEEK, Diallo recalled several statements Strauss-Kahn made during the alleged attack.
Defense lawyers are expected to challenge the nature of her injuries, her recollection of events, the veracity of elements of her life story, and her conduct with other men if the case proceeds.
Diallo’s supervisor, making the rounds, found her in the hallway. She could see Diallo was shaken and upset and asked what was wrong. “If somebody try to rape you in this job, what do you do?” Diallo asked her. The supervisor was angry when she heard of the assault, Diallo recalled. “She said, ‘The guest is a VIP guest, but I don’t give a damn.’” Another supervisor came, then two men from hotel security. One of them told Diallo, “If this was me, I would call the police.” At about 1:30 p.m., an hour after the first supervisor was told of the alleged attack, the hotel dialed 911.
At that moment, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was still one of the most powerful men in the world. As head of the IMF, he was the lead player in attempts to keep the European, and indeed the global, economy from plunging into a potentially apocalyptic recession. He was also getting ready to declare his candidacy for the presidency of France in an election only a year away. If he were to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy, the hugely unpopular incumbent, DSK would then govern a country that is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and has the world’s third-biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Prosecutors have identified a hotel concierge who says DSK made an unwanted advance to her the previous night. They have also identified a blonde American businesswoman observed going into the same elevator as Strauss-Kahn at 1:26 a.m. in what appears to have been a consensual relationship. (The French magazine Le Point reported implausibly in July that Strauss-Kahn had even admitted to his wife, the heiress and former television personality Anne Sinclair, that he had had sex with three women that Friday and Saturday as “a last glass before hitting the road for the [French] presidential campaign.”)
What’s more certain is that after checking out of the hotel at 12:28 p.m. on May 14, Strauss-Kahn went to lunch with his youngest daughter, Camille, who had been studying at Columbia University. From there, he went to JFK airport to catch Air France Flight 23 overnight to Paris. The next day he was supposed to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But as he waited to board the plane, Strauss-Kahn apparently couldn’t find his IMF cell phone. On another mobile, he called the Sofitel to ask if it had been found in the suite. The police, now on the scene at the hotel, had an employee say yes (although in fact the phone was not there) and ask where they could get it to him. The Air France terminal, Gate 4, he said, and asked them to rush to get it to JFK before takeoff. Instead, the Port Authority police were notified, and just before the plane was ready to taxi away from the gate, they took Strauss-Kahn off it. “The NYPD need to speak with you about an incident in the city at a hotel,” one of the cops told him.
While Strauss-Kahn languished in “the box,” the interview room at the Manhattan Special Victims Squad in Harlem, Nafissatou Diallo was taken to the hospital for examination, then back to the hotel with the police to walk through what had happened to her, showing them where she stood, where she fell, where she spit. As the day wore on, she became increasingly frantic about her daughter alone at home. Finally the police took her back to the Bronx at 3 in the morning. Neither she nor the girl could sleep. “She was so scared,” Diallo remembered.
But when Diallo watched the morning news, she was terrified: “I watched Channel 7 and they say this is [the] guy—I don’t know—and he is going to be the next president of France. And I think they are going to kill me.” The phone started to ring in her apartment as reporters found her number. Others appeared at her door. She woke her daughter and told her to pack her bag and get ready to stay with a relative. She told the girl how powerful DSK must be: “Now everybody say everything about me, all the bad things.” The girl tried to reassure her mother. “She says, ‘Please, Mom, don’t hurt yourself. I know one day the truth will come out.’ I was so happy when she said that.”
That afternoon, Diallo went back to the Special Victims Squad to look at a lineup of five men. “My heart was like this,“ she says, patting her chest. But she knew him immediately. “No. 3,” she said, and left as quickly as she could. Later she was housed in a hotel with her daughter for weeks, almost incommunicado, neither of them allowed cell phones after they were placed in protective custody by prosecutors. It would be almost two months before she was allowed to return to her apartment to pick up her possessions. “I don’t know why I have to do these things,” she says. “Is it because he is so powerful?”
To this day, we do not have DSK’s account of what happened in suite 2806. Since his arrest, Strauss-Kahn has shielded himself with highly skilled lawyers and investigators who have kept his version of events off the public record. His lawyer, William Taylor, told NEWSWEEK, “What disgusts me is an effort to pressure the prosecutors with street theater, and that is fundamentally wrong.” To charges of criminal sexual assault, attempted rape, and related offenses, Strauss-Kahn entered a plea of not guilty. Meanwhile, his supporters have attacked the maid’s account, her reputation, her background, and her associations. But Strauss-Kahn’s antecedents surfaced with a vengeance as well.
In 2008 DSK admitted to an affair with a subordinate at the IMF. Speaking to investigators, he called it “a personal mistake and a business mistake.” In July a young French journalist and novelist, Tristane Banon, filed charges against him in Paris for what she claims was an attempted rape in a Left Bank apartment where she went to interview him in 2003. She told fellow guests during a TV appearance in 2007 that he had come after her like “a chimpanzee in rut,” and her account bears some similarities to Diallo’s as she describes a man who seems to lose control completely when at the height of sexual desire. Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, is an ambitious politician in her own right who is often identified with Strauss-Kahn’s rivals in the French Socialist Party. She recently claimed that she herself had had consensual but “brutal” sex with him in 2000. Among DSK’s acquaintances from Paris to Washington to New York, dinner-party conversation is rife with tales of close calls and wild encounters. One French magazine calls him “Dr. Strauss and Mr. Kahn.” He also has long enjoyed a reputation as being hugely charming and seductive.
DNA evidence in suite 2806—the result of all that spitting that mingled the maid’s saliva and Strauss-Kahn’s sperm—makes it virtually impossible to deny there was a sexual encounter between DSK and Diallo. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers raised the possibility early on that it was consensual and have left it to others to speculate about the circumstances under which that might have been the case: that Diallo expected money that she did not receive, or that the sex got rougher and more aggressive than she would accept. The New York Post published stories attributed to an anonymous source that claimed Diallo was at least a part-time prostitute. Her lawyers, Kenneth Thompson and Douglas Wigdor, are now suing the Post, saying the story is false. The newspaper stands by its story.
In her interview with NEWSWEEK, Diallo didn’t disguise her anger at Strauss-Kahn. “Because of him they call me a prostitute,” she said. “I want him to go to jail. I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money.” She said she hoped God punishes him. “We are poor, but we are good,” she said. “I don’t think about money.”
Perhaps. But on the day of the incident, by Diallo’s own account, she made two telephone calls. One was to her daughter. The other call was to Blake Diallo, a Senegalese who is from the same ethnic group but no relation. He manages a restaurant, the Cafe 2115 in Harlem, where West Africans gather to eat, talk, politic, and sometimes listen to concerts. Nafissatou describes Blake as “a friend,” and one of the first things he did for her after the incident was to find her a personal-injury lawyer on the Internet.
More problematic were a series of phone calls that Nafissatou Diallo received from Amara Tarawally, whose uncle owned the bodega where Diallo worked when she first came to the United States. Originally from Sierra Leone, he divided his time between New York and Arizona, where he sold T shirts and fake designer handbags. But last year he was busted in a sting operation run by Arizona police when, according to cops, he paid them almost $40,000 cash for more than 100 pounds of marijuana.
On July 1, The New York Times reported the existence of a taped conversation between Diallo and Tarawally. The article said they talked the day after the incident at the Sofitel and quoted a “well-placed law enforcement official”: “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’” But at the time, prosecutors did not have a full transcript of the call, which had been conducted in a dialect of Fulani, Diallo’s language. The quote was a paraphrase from a translator’s summary of the tape, and the actual words are somewhat different, sources told NEWSWEEK.
In July NEWSWEEK talked to Tarawally in Arizona. He insisted that the quotation must refer to a later conversation and in any case was taken out of context. Diallo said she no longer talks to Tarawally. He used her bank account to move tens of thousands of dollars around the country without informing her, she said. She denied he ever gave her money to spend. “Like I say, he was my friend,” Diallo told us. “I used to trust him.”
But the list of reasons for prosecutors to doubt Diallo’s credibility does not begin or end with Tarawally. In a letter to DSK’s defense lawyers on June 30, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. cited several lies and deceptions in her past. She had claimed deductions for two children on her taxes instead of one. She had understated her income to get cheaper housing. And, most important, she had lied on her asylum application.
Diallo, a widow, came to the United States in 2003, leaving her then–7-year-old daughter behind in Guinea with a brother. Having entered the U.S. under dubious circumstances and without working papers, she lived with family members for some time, eking out an income braiding hair and then working in a bodega in the Bronx.
In late 2003 Diallo applied for asylum. Because she had suffered genital mutilation as a child, and doctors confirmed that fact in a medical report, she probably would have qualified for asylum in any case, given current law and practices. And she insists she was raped after curfew by two soldiers. (This is not unheard of in Guinea. In 2009 soldiers conducted mass rapes and killed as many as 160 people in a Conakry sports stadium, according to human-rights organizations.) But bad as the realities were in Diallo’s homeland, she admits the account that she gave the U.S. government on her asylum application was heavily embellished. Her fictionalized narrative worked to get her a green card and allow her to bring her child to America. But her past misstatements may make it impossible to win a criminal case against DSK based on her testimony.
Prosecutors are likely weeks away from making a decision on whether to proceed with the -charges. They remain confident that the forensic evidence shows a sexual encounter and impressed by the consistency of the story Diallo told to two maid supervisors, two hotel security guards, hospital personnel, and detectives during the first 24 hours. The prosecution team has “no idea what it is going to do yet,” a person close to the case said. The investigators are “treating it like any other case that runs into these problems, and that means gathering all the evidence.”
Given the issues of Diallo’s credibility, investigators have been building a “suspect profile” of DSK, interviewing other women who claim to have been assaulted or who had consensual affairs, trying to establish a pattern of behavior and comparing it to Diallo’s account. In mid-July they talked with the lawyer for Tristane Banon. Though not required to do so, New York prosecutors have begun the process of asking French authorities to let her speak to U.S. officials, providing the alleged victim some political cover in her home country, where the DSK case is a media rage.
Almost immediately after the indictment was secured and long before the public knew of the problems with Diallo’s past, prosecutors began digging around in her financial records and interviewing friends, looking for any evidence of extortion or criminal activity. The review found ties to shady acquaintances and suspicious transactions, to be sure, but no evidence of a premeditated plot against Strauss-Kahn.
It’s possible that Diallo is a woman who has lived for the last few years on the margins of quasi-illegal immigrant society in the Bronx, associating with petty con artists and dubious types trying to get a foothold in this country. But that does not preclude her having been the victim of a predatory and powerful man. Nor does it mean she will rule out an attempt to make some money from the situation.
Given the climate of suspicion that developed around her, Diallo’s last three encounters with authorities, on June 8, 20, and 28, were difficult sessions, as prosecutors grilled her like a defendant. The mistrust between Vance and Diallo’s lawyers boiled over on July 1, when Thompson held a news conference in front of the courthouse and accused the district attorney of abandoning Diallo.
Since then, both sides have tried to smooth matters over. Thompson has signaled a willingness to let his client be interviewed again if prosecutors let her see a transcript of the disputed prison call, and that is something prosecutors say they are willing to do. But the distrust and tensions could be renewed again after prosecutors learn of Diallo’s decision to go public after weeks of remaining in protective custody. Diallo says she gave the interview to NEWSWEEK to correct the misleading portrayal of her in the media. Her account of what happened has remained the same all along, she says. “I tell them about what this man do to me. It never changed. I know what this man do to me,” she says.
Looking to the future, Diallo says she would love to go back to working in a hotel, but maybe in the laundry. She wants never again to have to knock on a door and call out: “Hello? Housekeeper.”
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour thinks Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell didn't need to apologize for failing to include a mention of slavery in a declaration of April as Confederation History Month -- and bristled at Michael Steele's claim he was held to a higher standard because he's black.
When CNN "State of the Union" anchor Candy Crowley asked Barbour, a onetime lobbyist and former head of the RNC, if the slavery omission was a mistake, he said, "I don't think so, my legislature has made an active holiday of Confederate Memorial Day... Anyone who thinks that you have to explain that slavery is a bad thing, it goes without saying... It's sort of feeling that it's a nit, it's not significant, it's trying to make a big deal."
In a "State of the Union" interview that aired Sunday, Barbour predicted that Michael Steele, the target of resignation calls, would "be the head of the party through his term," pointedly adding, "His term ends in January of next year."
He said he sympathized with Steele, but disagreed with the RNC's head's contention that criticism of him had anything to do with race:
Steele saying he was targeted because he was black was like Barbour saying he was being slammed because he was "a fat redneck with an accent like this," the governor drawled.
The company is well known in West Virginia, in part because CEO Don Blankenship grew to become a fixture in state politics, doling out thousands of dollars to candidates he favored – most of them Republicans. In 2004, he spent millions on advertising that attacked a West Virginia state Supreme Court justice, leading to the election of challenger Brent Benjamin.
Massey had a $70 million case before the state Supreme Court and, once elected, Benjamin made the controversial decision not to recuse himself because of Blankenship's support of him and to hear arguments anyway. Another member of the court hearing the case was Chief Justice Elliott "Spike" Maynard.
He later recused himself after photographs surfaced showing that he vacationed with Blankenship in the French Riviera.
When an ABC News reporter tried to interview Blankenship about the possible conflicts in the parking lot of a Massey Energy office in Belfry, Ky., Blankenship became agitated.
"If you're going to start taking pictures of me, you're liable to get shot," Blankenship told the reporter before grabbing his camera.
Blankenship later told the Charleston Daily Mail he couldn't recall making any threats. "Quite frankly, I don't know what I said except that I know I'm never loud, vulgar or rude to strangers," he said.
The conflicts surrounding the state Supreme Court saga triggered a cascade of changes, including a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that called on judges to recuse themselves when major donors come before them in court, and a vote by the West Virginia legislature to adopt public financing of judicial campaigns.
Days of rescue efforts came to a grim end after crews found the bodies of four miners who had been missing since an explosion almost a week ago in a West Virginia mine, authorities said early Saturday.
"We did not receive the miracle we prayed for," said West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin. "This journey has ended and now the healing will start."
Authorities first notified the families of the four miners about their fate before revealing it to the media.
The death toll from Monday's blast at the Upper Big Branch mine now stands at 29, making it the worst mining disaster in the United States in nearly four decades.
On Friday, crews had reached a refuge chamber that had not been used, but the bad air forced them to evacuate before they reached the second chamber.
The airtight chambers were stocked with enough food, water and air to keep 15 miners alive for four days, but Manchin said none of the chambers had been deployed.
Rescue efforts have now turned to the difficult task of recovery, said Kevin Stricklin, of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
Of the 29 dead, the bodies of 22 still remain inside the mine. Stricklin said most of them will have to be hand-carried out because of the lack of equipment.
"It's hard to turn a rescue into a recovery with the same group of people," he said.
As days of rescue came to an end, funerals were held Friday for some of the seven dead whose bodies have been removed from the mine.
At the funeral for Benny Willingham, the Rev. Gary Pollard said the 61-year-old miner had three loves in life: God, his family and his job. "He loved God so much that every day was a holiday, every meal was a buffet," Pollard said at Mullens Pentecostal Holiness Church in Mullens.
Willingham, who was married for 33 years, was devoted to his church, Pollard said, and had been a Christian for 19 years. And though Willingham had been set to retire soon, Pollard said he didn't know whether retirement would have suited him: He loved the work.
Three other funerals were held Friday and one is set for Saturday.
The cause of Monday's blast is unknown, and state and federal officials have pledged a full investigation.
The explosion has prompted renewed questions about mine safety. Obama said Friday that "it's clear more needs to be done" to improve mine safety.
He will meet next week with Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and a Mine Safety and Health Administration official to hear their initial assessment of the cause of the blast and their recommendations on steps the federal government should take to improve safety.
Richmond, Virginia-based Massey Energy Co., which owns the mine, said in a statement released Friday that it will conduct "extensive" reviews of the mine accident "to ensure that a similar incident doesn't happen again."
It said the mine has had less than one violation per day in inspections by the Mine Safety and Health Administration and added that that rate is "consistent with national averages."
"Most of the citations issued by MSHA to [Upper Big Branch] in the last year were resolved on the same day they were issued," it said. "The safety of our members has been and will continue to be our top priority every day."
One of the unaccounted-for miners and 18 of the dead were working in an area where long wall cutting was taking place. The technique uses a large grinder to extract the coal and creates large amounts of coal dust and methane, both of which are explosive.
Manchin said that even though it's not clear what caused the explosion, there needs to be a focus on better ventilation and sensors to alert mine personnel when gas levels become dangerous.
"There was no way to protect them against this," he said. "You just have to prevent it and make sure it doesn't happen again."
The West Virginia blast was the worst mining disaster since 1972 when 91 miners were killed in a fire at the Sunshine Mine in Kellogg, Idaho.
A huge underground explosion blamed on methane gas killed 25 coal miners in the worst U.S. mining disaster in more than two decades.
Four others were missing Tuesday, their chances of survival dimming as rescuers were held back by poison gases that accumulated near the blast site, about 1.5 miles from the entrance to Massey Energy Co.'s sprawling Upper Big Branch mine.
The mine, about 30 miles south of Charleston, has a significant history of safety violations, including 57 infractions just last month for (among other things) not properly ventilating the highly combustible methane.
The federal records catalog the problems at the Upper Big Branch mine, operated by the Performance Coal Company. They show the company was fighting many of the steepest fines, or simply refusing to pay them. Performance is a subsidiary of Massey Energy.
The nation's sixth biggest mining company by production, Massey Energy took in $24 million in net income in the fourth quarter of 2009. The company paid what was then the largest financial settlement in the history of the coal industry for the 2006 fire at the Aracoma mine, also in West Virginia. The fire trapped 12 miners. Two suffocated as they looked for a way to escape. Aracoma later admitted in a plea agreement that two permanent ventilation controls had been removed in 2005 and not replaced, according to published reports.
Rescuers on Tuesday had to bulldoze an access road above it so they could begin drilling three shafts over 1,000 feet each to release methane and carbon monoxide that chased them from the mine after the blast Monday afternoon, Gov. Joe Manchin said at an early morning news briefing Tuesday. Drilling and ensuring rescuers can safely go in could take up to 12 hours, meaning the search was unlikely to resume before 6 p.m. Tuesday.
"It's going to be a long day and we're not going to have a lot of information until we can get the first hole through," Manchin said.
It had already been a long day for grieving relatives, some angry because they found out their loved ones were among the dead from government officials or a company Web site, not from Massey Energy executives.
"They're supposed to be a big company," said Michelle McKinney, whose father, 62-year-old Benny R. Willingham, died in the blast. She found out from a local official at a school near the mine. "These guys, they took a chance every day to work and make them big. And they couldn't even call us."
McKinney said her husband is a miner too and her 16-year-old son doesn't want him to go back to work. Willingham, who had mined for 30 years, the last 17 with Massey, was just five weeks from retiring and planned to take his wife on a cruise to the Virgin Islands next month.
"Benny was the type – he probably wouldn't have stayed retired long," said his sister-in-law, Sheila Prillaman said. "He wasn't much of a homebody."
Meanwhile, others waited for word about missing loved ones. Kevin Stricklin, an administrator for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, said the situation looked grim.
"All we have left is hope, and we're going to continue to do what we can," he said.
Officials hoped the four miners still unaccounted for were able to reach airtight chambers stocked with food, water and enough oxygen for them to live for four days, but rescue teams checked one of two such chambers nearby and it was empty. The buildup of gases prevented teams from reaching other chambers, officials said.
A total of 31 miners were in the area during a shift change when the explosion rocked the mine.
"Before you knew it, it was just like your ears stopped up, you couldn't hear and the next thing you know, it's just like you're just right in the middle of a tornado," miner Steve Smith, who heard the explosion but was able to escape, told ABC's "Good Morning America."
Some of those killed may have died in the blast and others when they breathed in the gas-filled air, Stricklin said. Eleven bodies had been recovered and identified, but the other 14 have not. Names weren't released publicly, but Manchin said three of the dead are members of the same family.
He said investigators still don't know what ignited the blast, but methane likely played a part.
The death toll is the highest in a U.S. mine since 1984, when 27 died in a fire at Emery Mining Corp.'s mine in Orangeville, Utah. If the four missing bring the total to 29, it would be the most killed in a U.S. mine since a 1970 explosion killed 38 at Finley Coal Co., in Hyden, Ky.
"There's always danger. There's so many ways you can get hurt, or your life taken," said Gary Williams, a miner and pastor of New Life Assembly, a church near the southern West Virginia mine. "It's not something you dread every day, but there's always that danger. But for this area, it's the only way you're going to make a living."
Though the situation looked bleak, Manchin said miracles can happen and pointed to the 2006 Sago Mine explosion that killed 12. Crews found miner Randal McCloy Jr. alive after he was trapped for more than 40 hours in an atmosphere poisoned with carbon monoxide.
In Monday's blast, nine miners were leaving on a vehicle that takes them in and out of the mine's long shaft when a crew ahead of them felt a blast of air and went back to investigate, Stricklin said.
They found seven workers dead. Others were hurt or missing about a mile and a half inside the mine, though there was some confusion over how many. Others made it out.
Massey Energy, a publicly traded company based in Richmond, Va., has 2.2 billion tons of coal reserves in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia and Tennessee. It ranks among the nation's top five coal producers and is among the industry's most profitable. It has a spotty safety record.
In the past year, federal inspectors fined the company more than $382,000 for repeated serious violations involving its ventilation plan and equipment at Upper Big Branch.
ABC News has also documented the highly controversial relationship between Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship and a local judge who has refused to recuse himself from cases involving Massey Energy despite long fundraising and personal ties between the two men. In 2004, Blankenship physically resisted an ABC reporter trying to ask him about the matter.
Methane is one of the great dangers of coal mining, and federal records say the Eagle coal seam releases up to 2 million cubic feet of methane gas into the Upper Big Branch mine every 24 hours, which is a large amount, said Dennis O'Dell, health and safety director for the United Mine Workers labor union.
In mines, giant fans are used to keep the colorless, odorless gas concentrations below certain levels. If concentrations are allowed to build up, the gas can explode with a spark roughly similar to the static charge created by walking across a carpet in winter, as at the Sago mine, also in West Virginia.
Since then, federal and state regulators have required mine operators to store extra oxygen supplies. Upper Big Branch uses containers that can generate about an hour of breathable air, and all miners carry a container on their belts besides the stockpiles inside the mine. Upper Big Branch has had three other fatalities in the last dozen years.
Upper Big Branch has 19 openings and roughly 7-foot ceilings. Inside, it's crisscrossed with railroad tracks used for hauling people and equipment. It is located in a mine-laced swath of Raleigh and Boone counties that is the heart of West Virginia's coal country.
The seam produced 1.2 million tons of coal in 2009, according to the mine safety agency, and has about 200 employees.
"The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration will investigate this tragedy, and take action," U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said in a statement. "Miners should never have to sacrifice their lives for their livelihood."
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