Overview
On 14 May 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn was removed from an Air France flight at John F. Kennedy airport minutes before departure and arrested. A housekeeper at the Sofitel New York, Nafissatou Diallo, had reported that he sexually assaulted her in his suite earlier that day. He was managing director of the International Monetary Fund and led every poll for the French presidential election eleven months away.
He resigned from the IMF within a week. He never ran.
The Collapse of the Case
Forensic evidence established that a sexual encounter had taken place. What the prosecution could not sustain was Diallo's account of it.
In the months after the arrest, investigators established that she had given false information in her asylum application, including a fabricated account of gang rape, and had been untruthful about her movements immediately after the incident and about other matters. In August 2011 the Manhattan District Attorney's office moved to dismiss, stating that she had "not been truthful on matters great and small" and that it could not ask a jury to rely on her testimony beyond reasonable doubt. The office was explicit that this was a finding about the provability of the case rather than about what had occurred in the suite.
Diallo brought a civil action. It was settled confidentially in December 2012.
The Theory
Polling in France after the arrest found a majority of respondents believing Strauss-Kahn had been the victim of a plot. The theory had a ready shape: he was the Socialist most likely to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy, he had been pushing the IMF toward positions unwelcome in Washington, and he had fallen in a foreign jurisdiction with unusual speed.
Its supporting details are mostly circumstantial and mostly real. Hotel security footage showed two Sofitel staff members embracing in a manner that struck some observers as celebratory shortly after the report was made. Diallo made a phone call from custody to a man in an immigration detention facility in Arizona, a conversation Strauss-Kahn's lawyers claimed was incriminating and prosecutors said was not. The speed with which the arrest became public in France, and the circulation of the perp-walk images, were read as deliberate.
Strauss-Kahn himself has consistently described the affair as a political trap while acknowledging the encounter.
What Weighs Against It
Nothing has ever connected any French political actor to the Sofitel. The theory requires a housekeeper who had worked at the hotel for three years to have been recruited, or to have improvised opportunistically, in a window of minutes. The prosecutorial decision that ended the case was made by an elected American district attorney with no evident stake in French politics, and it was made in Strauss-Kahn's favour.
His subsequent legal history is also part of the record. He was investigated in France in the Carlton affair in Lille over organised prostitution and acquitted in 2015, and a separate French complaint of attempted rape by the writer Tristane Banon was closed as time-barred, with prosecutors stating that the evidence pointed to conduct that could have supported a lesser charge had it not expired.
What It Established
Two things are settled. A criminal case against one of the most powerful men in the world collapsed because his accuser had lied about other things, which is exactly how such cases usually collapse. And in France a plot was the majority explanation before any of the evidence was public — a reflex that says as much about the moment as about the case.