The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

unnamed “right-wing heavyweight” as saying, “It happened as planned,” and a user of Post.fr accused Pinet of participating in “a carefully orchestrated operation” by the UMP.

Interestingly, Strauss-Kahn had previously given an off-the-record interview with France’s Liberation newspaper saying he suspected that his enemies would plot to destroy his career. He imagined “a woman (who I supposedly) raped in a car park and who had been promised 500,000 or a million euros to invent such a story.” A woman like the Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo, perhaps, who was not quite the innocent mother portrayed by the prosecutor’s office, having apparently lied in her asylum application and married a drug-dealer.

By the weird coincidence every good conspiracy needs, DSK’s room number at the Sofitel was 2806, which corresponds to the date of the opening of the Socialist Party primaries in France, 28 June.

According to another, minority, strand of the “l’affaire DSK”, the sixty-three-year- old Frenchman was an innocent victim in a much bigger scheme. Michelle Sabban, a supporter of Strauss-Kahn and Vice-President of the Regional Council of Ile-de-France, told Le Monde: “I am convinced it is an international conspiracy. It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him… It’s the IMF that they wanted to decapitate, not just the candidate in the Socialist primary.”

A number of prominent economists stepped forward to explain that under Socialist DSK the IMF had taken a pro-left, pro-Third World tilt. They quoted his words in an address at George Washington University: “Globalisation has delivered a lot… but it also has a dark side, a large and growing chasm between the rich and the poor. Clearly we need a new form of globalisation to prevent the ‘invisible hand’ of loosely regulated markets from becoming ‘an invisible fist’.”

Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in Reagan’s time, added his dime’s worth in a syndicated column: “Strauss-Kahn is being framed up because the IMF recently announced that ‘the age of America is over’, that China will be the number one economy within five years. This was a massive blow to Washington, and they are taking their revenge.”

Meanwhile, news reports from Russia suggested that DSK was arrested because he had discovered that the USA was stalling in its pledged delivery of 191.3 tons of gold to fund the Special Drawing Rights. Another report out of Russia, picked up by the EU Times, stated that: “a new report prepared for Prime Minister Putin by the Federal Security Service (FSB) says that former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged and jailed in the US for sex crimes on May 14th after his discovery that all of the gold held in the United States Bullion Depository located at Fort Knox was ‘missing and/or unaccounted’ for.”

The verdict on l’affaire DSK: there is little reason to suspect that Pinet’s tweet was anything other that what he said it was—message from a friend working at the Sofitel in Manhattan. Dessaier, as a known opponent of DSK, could hardly be expected to have done anything other than retweet with glee. Although bluffing cannot be ruled out, it is significant that the French interior minister, Claude Gueant—a close associate of President Nicolas Sarkozy—dismissed as “scandalous” suggestions made by DSK’s Socialist pals that his arrest in New York was organized in Paris. Gueant advised Socialist politicians to “make a formal legal complaint… or shut up.” Similarly, the French Accor hotel group, which owns the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan where the sexual attack allegedly took place, threatened legal action against anyone who suggested that the company had been involved in a plot against Mr Strauss-Kahn. And the idea that DSK was a tribune of the people at the IMF is risible. Ask the people of Greece.

The most likely explanation of the DSK affair is the most obvious one. DSK had a reputation as a predatory womanizer. “The only real problem with Strauss-Kahn,” Jean Quatremer of Liberation had noted in 2007, “is his attitude to women. He is too insistent…” Despite being married to French TV reporter (and multi-millionairess) Anne Sinclair, he had an affair with a junior Hungarian colleague at the IMF. After DSK’s arrest at JFK airport, the French journalist Tristane Banon came forward to announce that DSK had made a sexual attack on her a number of years before. Strauss-Kahn was not helped by the news that Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who put him up as IMF president, advised him to keep his trousers zipped in America and not to get into elevators with interns.

The criminal charges against DSK were eventually dismissed at the request of the prosecution due to serious doubts about Diallo’s credibility (see Document, p.533). At this point, supporters of Ms Diallo suggested that she was the victim of conspiracy involving the best lawyers and muckrakers money can buy.

Oh, and DSK’s nickname? Le Perv.

DOCUMENT: RECOMMENDATION FOR DISMISSAL: THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK AGAINST DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN

The People of the State of New York move to dismiss the above-captioned indictment, which charges the defendant with sexually assaulting the complainant at a hotel in midtown Manhattan on May 14, 2011. The crimes charged in the indictment require the People to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant engaged in a sexual act with the complainant using forcible compulsion and without her consent. After an extensive investigation, it is clear that proof of two critical elements—force and lack of consent—would rest solely on the testimony of the complaining witness at trial. The physical, scientific, and other evidence establishes that the defendant engaged in a hurried sexual encounter with the complainant, but it does not independently establish her claim of a forcible, nonconsensual encounter. Aside from the complainant and the defendant, there are no other eyewitnesses to the incident. Undeniably, then, for a trial jury to find the defendant guilty, it must be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the complainant is credible. Indeed, the case rises and falls on her testimony. At the time of the indictment, all available evidence satisfied us that the complainant was reliable. But evidence gathered in our post- indictment investigation severely undermined her reliability as a witness in this case. That an individual has lied in the past or committed criminal acts does not necessarily render them unbelievable to us as prosecutors, or keep us from putting them on the witness stand at trial. But the nature and number of the complainant’s falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever the truth may be about the encounter between the complainant and the defendant. If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot ask a jury to do so.

We have summarized below the circumstances that have led us to this conclusion. This is is not a case where undue scrutiny or a heightened standard is being imposed on a complainant. Instead, we are confronted with a situation in which it has become increasingly clear that the complainant’s credibility cannot withstand the most basic evaluation. In short, the complainant has provided shifting and inconsistent versions of the events surrounding the alleged assault, and as a result, we cannot be sufficiently certain of what actually happened on May 14, 2011, or what account of these events the complainant would give at trial. In virtually every substantive interview with prosecutors, despite entreaties to simply be truthful, she has not been truthful, on matters great and small, many pertaining to her background and some relating to the circumstances of the incident itself. Over the course of two interviews, for example, the complainant gave a vivid, highly detailed, and convincing account of having been raped in her native country, which she now admits is entirely false. She also gave prosecutors and the grand jury accounts of her actions immediately after the encounter with the defendant that she now admits are false. This longstanding pattern of untruthfulness predates the complainant’s contact with this Office. Our investigation revealed that the complainant has made numerous prior false statements, including ones contained in government filings, some of which were made under oath or penalty of perjury. All of these falsehoods would, of course, need to be disclosed to a jury at trial, and their cumulative effect would be devastating. Finally, we have conducted a thorough investigation in an effort to uncover any evidence that might speak to the nature of the sexual encounter between the complainant and the defendant. All of the evidence that might be relevant to the contested issues of force and lack of consent is simply inconclusive. We do not make this recommendation lightly. Our grave concerns about the complainant’s reliability make it impossible to resolve the question of what exactly happened in the defendant’s hotel suite on May 14, 2011, and therefore preclude further prosecution of this case. Accordingly, we respectfully recommend that the indictment be dismissed.