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In Hospital Report, Housekeeper’s Graphic Account of Attack
By JOHN ELIGON
As soon as she entered Room 2806 of the Sofitel New York, a hotel housekeeper said, a naked Dominique Strauss-Kahn pushed her to the bed and, as she sat, began to sexually assault her. She freed herself, only to have him pull her toward the bathroom. After she fell to the ground, she said, he forced her again into a sexual act.
Versions of this narrative have been told in court and in various criminal do ents since Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested in May on sexual assault charges.
But this is the most direct account of the housekeeper’s version of events to be offered so far. It comes from a report prepared by a counselor at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where the housekeeper was treated just hours after she said she was attacked, and where she related for one of the first times what happened in the hotel suite.
The report, which has been provided to prosecutors and defense lawyers, provides a counselor’s notes of the graphic story told by the 32-year-old Guinean housekeeper, whose credibility has since been called into serious question by prosecutors because of lies they say she told during her immigration application and at other times.
While prosecutors now express severe doubts about the strength of their case, this account is suggestive of a serious sexual assault, which led prosecutors to charge Mr. Strauss-Kahn with attempted rape and sexual abuse.
There are a couple of sentences in the report, however, that the defense could focus on, most notably one that could be interpreted as the housekeeper’s saying that after the alleged attack, she observed Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, getting dressed — something that would run counter to her later version of what happened.
Although the Manhattan district attorney’s office agreed last week to release Mr. Strauss-Kahn from house arrest, prosecutors said they still believed that there was evidence of a forcible sexual attack.
Most of their problems with the case, they said, had to do not with the woman’s account of the attack, but rather with inconsistencies in her life story — lies she told on her asylum application and tax returns; deposits that were made to a bank account in her name; and a conversation she had with a man in federal custody in Arizona.
The one major discrepancy that prosecutors have pointed out in the woman’s version of the attack is that in her grand jury testimony, she said she waited in the hallway for Mr. Strauss-Kahn to leave after the attack. But she has since told investigators that she cleaned a nearby room after the attack, according to the prosecution.
The account given to the rape counselor stands out for its detail.
According to the counselor’s notes, the woman said a room service attendant had told her that no one was in the suite. As soon as the housekeeper walked in, she told the counselor, a man, “naked, with ‘white hair,’ ” locked the door behind her and pushed her onto the bed.
He “put his penis into her mouth briefly,” the report said. She told him to stop and tried to get away, according to the report, but he pulled her toward the bathroom. He put his hands under her clothes and touched her crotch area, the report said. After she fell to the carpeted floor, according to the report, Mr. Strauss-Kahn again forced her to perform oral sex, grabbing her by the hair and controlling her head with force.
The woman’s lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, has since said the housekeeper suffered bruising to her vagina during the episode.
She spit onto the carpet once the sexual encounter was over, according to the report. Then, the report said, the patient “reports he got dressed” and “left the room, and that he said nothing to her during the incident.”
Those sentences raise the question of exactly where the woman was when Mr. Strauss-Kahn got dressed. If she was in the room, it would not be consistent with the two versions she has told investigators, both of which have her fleeing the room after the attack. It also raises the question of what communication they had with each other if Mr. Strauss-Kahn did not speak.
The lawyer William W. Taylor III, who along with Benjamin Brafman is representing Mr. Strauss-Kahn, declined to comment.
The report continues that the woman washed out her mouth with water. The woman also told her supervisor that there was blood on the bedsheets but that it did not belong to her, the report said. The woman was interviewed by Special Victims Squad detectives at the hospital and called her daughter, the report said.
Daniel R. Alonso, the chief assistant to the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also declined to comment.
But in interviews over the weekend, prosecutors in the office have maintained that they have done what they are supposed to do, given the evidence they had at each step of the case.
“We’re doing our job,” said Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, the lead prosecutor on the Strauss-Kahn case. “We don’t get paid by indictment. We don’t get paid by convictions. We get paid to do the right thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/ny...gewanted=print
