NEW YORK, (Reuters) – Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had consensual sex with the hotel maid who accused him of sexual assault, his defense lawyer said yesterday, adding that their comparative sizes would have ruled out a forcible encounter.
“This encounter was quick, it was consensual and she was a willing participant,” defense attorney Benjamin Brafman told Reuters in an interview.
A New York judge on Tuesday dismissed criminal sexual assault charges against Strauss-Kahn, 62, after prosecutors said they had lost faith in the credibility of his accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, a 32-year-old hotel maid from Guinea.
Diallo accused him of forcing her to have oral sex when she went into his $3,000-a-day suite in New York’s Sofitel Hotel to clean it and he emerged naked to attack her. Strauss-Kahn denied her allegations.
Prosecutors gave up on the case because of contradictions in Diallo’s account of what happened immediately following the sexual encounter on May 14 and because of lies about her past.
Brafman said he found her story implausible largely because “she towers over him.”
“In a one-on-one she would probably win if this turned into a fist fight. She is not a small person,” Brafman said.
