NEW YORK – The collapsing attempted-rape case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn has revealed not only that his accuser appears to be an incorrigible liar — but also shockingly lax immigration oversight of asylum seekers.
A national of Guinea, the 32-year-old accuser — who continues to enjoy the privilege of remaining anonymous as an alleged sex-crime victim — received legal asylum after recounting horrendous stories of her plight in her West African homeland.
But a letter prosecutors filed with the Supreme Court in Manhattan recounts how she has now admitted that much of what she said was a lie — and that lying to improve her lot became a way of life for her after she was admitted to the country.
The most damning thing she said in terms of disqualifying her as a credible witness in the prosecution of Strauss-Khan, 62, was that Guinean soldiers gang-raped her because she and her husband in that country opposed the ruling regime.
She told Manhattan prosecutors that she had indeed been raped, but not in that way, the letter says. She had embellished her story, her lawyer said, in order to boost her asylum application.
Her asylum bid was, in fact, so sophisticated that some unknown collaborator had even given her a tape of the story she should tell, the letter says. She apparently listened to the tape over and over to learn the story by heart.
The Manhattan prosecutors took but a few interview sessions with her to break her down and have her admit to the ruse, and to having told a multitude of other lies — some of them relating directly to the case against Strauss-Kahn.
Back in 2004, however, gullible refugee processing officials lapped up the gang-rape story and gave her papers that allowed her to stay in the country.
There’s no reason to believe that there’s any better oversight in Canada, which accepts even more asylum seekers per population.
As far back as 2001, I revealed that a secret RCMP-assisted United Nations probe determined most individuals or families admitted to Canada from Kenyan refugee camps over the previous six years paid bribes of up to US$7,000 each to local UN staff for help in slipping past the Canadian screening process.
In that case, UN officials were demanding the bribes, while Canadian officials “assumed the UN agency was providing reliable material and approved many of the cases,” sources told me at the time.
Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, once inside the United States, proceeded to dupe even more social services types, winning the right to remain in subsidized housing by lying about her income, the Manhattan prosecutors uncovered. They learned she also lied on her income tax returns, claiming deductions for two children, when she has only one.
In one interview with the prosecutors, the woman “threw herself to the floor in response to questions,” The New York Times, reported, citing a “well-placed source.”
Which all goes to show, with just a little bit of verbal pressure, this asylum beneficiary could indeed be outed by determined truth seekers. But such types are not, apparently, to be found among the administrators of the asylum process that granted her leave to remain in the United States, or in the oversight mechanism for subsidized housing.
It’s not as if the prosecutors hadn’t given the maid a fair shake. The proof that they listened to her, and initially took her at her word, lies in the fact police were dispatched to arrest Strauss-Kahn at the earliest opportunity after she claimed he’d sexually assaulted her as she tried to clean his luxury suite in Manhattan’s Sofitel hotel May 14.
The police yanked him from a Paris-bound plane at John F. Kennedy Airport within hours of the alleged incident.
We learned at the time that the police knew of his whereabouts thanks to Strauss-Kahn himself, because the Frenchman called the hotel to say that he’d left behind one of his cell phones, and revealed his location so that a hotel staffer could deliver the device to him.
But the prosecutors were faced with a woman crying attempted rape, so they’d hardly be swayed by the notion that his calling was inconsistent with that of a man who knows he should be running from the law.
You can bet that high in the prosecutors’ collective mind would also have been the inevitable backlash from women’s activist groups had they let a suspected sex attacker return to France, which does not extradite its nationals.
There would have been immediate comparisons to the debacle over the 1977 sex-with-a-minor case against Franco-Polish film director Roman Polanski, who fled the United States for France in order to avoid sentencing after admitting to having sexually abused a 13-year-old girl.
Indeed, against the backdrop of politically correct dictates, the prosecutors and police appeared to spare Strauss-Kahn no indignity as they shoved him through the booking system.
This was despite the uproar that erupted in France over the way the U.S. authorities subjected him to the infamous “perp walk” — which saw him paraded in front of cameras, wrists cuffed behind his back.
For the French, this was one of their most high-profile personalities: IMF chief when arrested, and a leading Socialist Party contender to challenge French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the country’s next presidential election.
Strauss-Kahn’s arrest led to his having to resign his IMF post, and drop out of the race for the French presidency.
The woman, meanwhile, remains unidentified, while experts say she is unlikely to face perjury charges over her Grand Jury testimony that led to Stauss-Kahn’s indictment — for fear it will send the wrong message to sex-assault victims.
And yet, there’s no need to feel too sorry for Strauss-Kahn, a married man whose defence in the case was that he did have sex with the maid, but that it was consensual.
The New York Post cites a source “close to the defence” Saturday who said the maid was doubling as a prostitute — hence the sex act may have been transactional. And her lawyer continues to insist that, despite his client’s past “mistakes,” she’s not lying about her encounter with Strauss-Kahn. It was violent, he says.
Still, this was one asylum seeker that should have been stopped in her tracks from the get-go. When screeners are ready to bite at any old sob story, the integrity of the entire program is called into question. That can only lead to doors being closed to genuine refugees and asylum seekers, as the public loses confidence in the bureaucrats’ ability to keep out the scammers.
Steven Edwards is the Postmedia Correspondent in New York.
Source: National Post
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