FRANCE’S DEBATE over the attempted rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been revived by his accuser’s decision to grant media interviews in the United States.
Nafissatou Diallo, the 32-year-old Guinean woman who claims the former head of the International Monetary Fund tried to rape her in a New York hotel on May 14th, recounted her story in public for the first time in interviews with Newsweekmagazine and on ABC television this week.
Although French media, unlike American outlets, have reported the accuser’s name since May and reported extensively on her life story, her first public appearances have been given front-page treatment in most national newspapers, with pages analysing her motivations and demeanor.
Under the headline "A Winning Strategy?", news magazine Le Pointcited French and US lawyers who expressed doubts about the wisdom of Ms Diallo's decision to go public.
The interviews would give Mr Strauss-Kahn’s legal team useful material to cross-check against her earlier statements to police, doctors and the grand jury in search of discrepancies. They also risked causing people to question her motivation, it suggested.
Christopher Mesnooh, a lawyer who practises in Paris and New York, saw it differently, telling the news channel i-Télé: “It can only play in Ms Diallo’s favour.”
L'Express, another weekly magazine, noted that Ms Diallo had stuck closely to the accounts already in the public domain and had not used the interviews to reveal new information. "The aims are to be found elsewhere," it said. "In the office of the prosecutor, Cyrus Vance, no doubt."
In keeping with much of the analysis, L'Expresssaid Ms Diallo's legal team was trying to pressurise the New York district attorney into pursuing the charges against Mr Strauss-Kahn amid speculation that the case could soon collapse over doubts about her credibility.
The timing – a week before Mr Strauss-Kahn's next court appearance on August 1st – "supports this interpretation", L'Expresssaid.
In vox pops and online comments, the Diallo interviews appeared to have reassured her defenders, who saw it as an attempt to correct a misleading portrayal of her in the media and found her account convincing and consistent.
They also energised Mr Strauss-Kahn's supporters, however, who described it as part of a media strategy and seized on the Newsweekjournalists' observation that "there were moments when [Ms Diallo's] tears seemed forced."