Kanyi Okeke
Shamed former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn made a £950,000 pay-off to the New York hotel cleaner who accused him of trying to rape her. The disgraced economist, 64, and chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo reached the deal to end all legal action for sexual assault against him in the US.
The six-figure sum is considerably less than the £3.5 million Strauss-Kahn was reported to have paid Ms Diallo in December, France’s Journal de Dimanche newspaper said.
The 30-year-old chambermaid then paid £320,000 in legal fees, leaving her a settlement of £630,000 , the Sunday paper reported.
Strauus-Kahn – once tipped as a future president of France – was arrested in May 2011 for trying to rape Guinea immigrant Miss Diallo when she came to clean his suite in New York’s Sofitel hotel.
He was charged with attempted rape, sexual abuse, a criminal sexual act, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching and held at the city’s notorious Ryker’s Island prison.
Nafissatou Diallo, 30, took out a civil case against Strauss-Kahn who she said subjected her to a ‘violent and sadistic attack’
He claimed Ms Diallo had consented to sex but later described the encounter as ‘a moral failure’ that he would regret his whole life.
All charges were then dropped a month later over concerns about the housekeeper’s credibility.
She went on to file a civil case against him for what she called a ‘violent and sadistic attack’ that humiliated and degraded her, and ‘robbed her of her dignity as a woman’.
Strauss-Kahn also faces legal woes in France, where he returned after criminal charges were dropped, only to face similar accusations of sexually abusing a young French writer.
When those allegations were also abandoned, he was then confronted with more claims he used hookers supplied by a vice network in Lille, northern France.
He now stands accused of conspiring with pimps to procure girls for sex parties around the world, and of knowing fraudulently obtained money was being paid to the prostitutes.
Strauss-Kahn confessed to attending many group sex sessions but insisted he did not know the young women were hookers and that he often had sex with ‘willing girls’ in their 20s.
He is now under ‘judicial control’ on 385,000 bail until judges rule later this year on whether he should stand trial over the accusations.
