(AP) — The hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault made her first public appearance Thursday, thanking her supporters and saying she and her family had gone through a lot in the last two months.
Speaking at a cultural center in Brooklyn, a visibly nervous Nafissatou Diallo told a throng of reporters she was speaking because she wanted to “let people know a lot of things they say about me is not true.”
It was the 32-year-old’s first public appearance since breaking her silence in recent interviews with ABC and Newsweek.
It’s nearly unheard of for an alleged sex assault victim to speak publicly before the end of court proceedings, and it’s not clear whether her decision to come forward affected her already-tenuous relationship with the prosecutors investigating her case.
Diallo and her attorney met with prosecutors on Wednesday for nearly eight hours. It was their first meeting since the Manhattan district attorney’s office publicly announced it had doubts about her credibility. The office said she lied about what she did in the moments after her encounter with Strauss-Kahn and about her background, including by telling prosecutors a false story of having been gang-raped in her native Guinea.
Prosecutors also were concerned that the woman had mentioned Strauss-Kahn’s wealth in a recorded conversation with an incarcerated friend, and that she had little explanation for tens of thousands of dollars other people had deposited in her bank account, a law enforcement official has said.