At the time, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not merely a leading French figure. He was head of the IMF and was seen as one of the main potential candidates for the 2012 French presidential election. His arrest in New York therefore immediately sent shockwaves around the world. Four days after the alleged incident, on 18 May 2011, he resigned as head of the IMF with immediate effect, whilst firmly rejecting the charges against him.
The image of DSK in handcuffs, paraded before the American cameras, was seen around the world. For several weeks, it seemed the case was set to lead to a high-profile criminal trial.
But the case became more complicated.
Sexual intercourse established, but a charge impossible to sustain in criminal proceedings
Investigations established that sexual intercourse did indeed take place between Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nafissatou Diallo. However, the Manhattan District Attorney’s report explains that the physical evidence does not allow for an independent determination of whether this act was obtained by force or was consensual.
The central issue then becomes the complainant’s credibility.
During the investigation, prosecutors uncovered several lies concerning her past, notably certain details in her asylum application, as well as contradictions in her accounts of what she had done immediately after the incident. For the New York Public Prosecutor’s Office, these issues became significant enough to prevent her testimony from being presented to a jury with the certainty required in criminal proceedings.
On 23 August 2011, the charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn were therefore dropped. This point is crucial: this withdrawal does not establish that the assault did not take place. On the contrary, the prosecutor explained that he was no longer in a position to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the sexual encounter had been forced.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has always denied that any violence or coercion took place. In September 2011, on TF1, he acknowledged that a sexual encounter had taken place, which he described as a ‘moral failing’, whilst maintaining that it was consensual.
Two irreconcilable accounts therefore remain.
Nafissatou Diallo decides to press ahead
The discontinuation of the criminal proceedings does not completely close the case.
Nafissatou Diallo is suing Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the US civil courts. Here, the issue is no longer one of securing a criminal conviction but of determining potential liability and damages.
After more than a year of negotiations, the two parties finally reached an out-of-court settlement in December 2012 before a court in the Bronx.
The exact amount has never been officially disclosed. Various figures have circulated in the press — ranging up to several million dollars — but the settlement signed by both parties is confidential. It would therefore be inaccurate to present any of these figures as definitive today.
This settlement marks the legal conclusion of the US chapter of the case.
For Nafissatou Diallo, a new chapter begins: that of a woman who became world-famous against her will and is seeking to return to an ordinary life.
A restaurant to start afresh
She gradually faded from the media spotlight.
In 2014, she attempted to rebuild her life by opening a restaurant in the Bronx called ‘Chez Amina’, serving African, American and Spanish cuisine, amongst other things. At the time, she presented the restaurant as a symbol of her new life.
But this attempt to return to anonymity did not go to plan.
The restaurant also attracted onlookers who came not to eat but to catch a glimpse of ‘the woman from the DSK affair’. The restaurant was then destroyed by fire in 2015. Nafissatou Diallo eventually withdrew from the business and moved away from New York.
She later explained that she had received death threats, demands for money and messages accusing her of having fabricated the whole affair to obtain financial compensation. She said she had to move into a secure building and then leave the New York area.
In 2020, she abruptly broke her silence
For years, there was almost no news.
Then, in September 2020, Nafissatou Diallo agreed to a lengthy interview with *Paris Match*. This was her most significant public statement since the end of the legal proceedings.
She did not retract her accusations.
“I told the truth,” she asserted, explaining that she felt she had been “denied justice”. She also describes the trauma of media scrutiny and states that the case has profoundly damaged her life.
In particular, she recounts the threats, the accusations of blackmail, her move and the difficulty of living with a case which, nine years on, continues to define her in the eyes of strangers.
She then mentions plans for a charity aimed at helping immigrant women who have arrived in the United States with no resources, no command of the language and facing vulnerable situations.
Since that 2020 interview, Nafissatou Diallo has once again kept a very low profile. No comparable public statement has been widely reported. It is not known for certain where she lives today or what her current occupation is.
And this lack of information seems to correspond precisely to what she had long been seeking: to return to being a private individual.
A case that went beyond its two protagonists
The Sofitel affair remains extraordinary in terms of its consequences.
Within a few days, it led to the resignation of the IMF’s Managing Director and put an end to any prospect of Dominique Strauss-Kahn standing as a candidate in the 2012 French presidential election.
It also sparked a much broader debate in France on power dynamics, the sexuality of public figures, the media’s coverage of allegations of sexual violence, and the way in which the testimony of a socially vulnerable woman is scrutinised when she accuses an extremely powerful man.
The case occurred six years before the global #MeToo movement took off.
With hindsight, it almost seems like one of the events that foreshadowed the debates which would dominate the entire following decade: how should we treat a complainant’s account? How should they be assessed? Can someone who has lied about certain aspects of their past nevertheless tell the truth about an assault? And how can we avoid both a media trial without due process and the automatic discrediting of the accuser?
The US justice system, for its part, has never answered the fundamental question: what exactly happened in room 2806?
It simply concluded that it could no longer establish Nafissatou Diallo’s account beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal context.
The character has even entered literature
As a sign of how deeply this story has lodged itself in the collective imagination, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie drew freely on Nafissatou Diallo to create Kadiatou, one of the characters in her novel *The Inventory of Dreams*, published in 2025. This Guinean woman, working as a chambermaid in the United States, finds herself confronted by a powerful man and an accusation of sexual assault, the similarities with the Sofitel case being deliberate.
This is perhaps the ultimate strangeness of the story.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has remained a public figure whose activities have regularly continued to make headlines. Nafissatou Diallo, for her part, tried to fade from view.
In May 2011, she was a virtually unknown chambermaid, a Guinean immigrant and a mother. A few hours later, her face and name were all over the global news.
Fifteen years on, she seems to have managed to regain what the affair had taken from her almost instantly: a measure of anonymity.
But her name will remain associated with one of those very rare news stories capable, in a matter of minutes, of turning an individual’s life, an international institution and a chapter of French political history on their heads.
