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Jul 13, 2011 6:55 AM EDT / http://www.thedailybeast.com.
A call with an Arizona inmate tarnished the case of Strauss-Kahn's accuser. The man, who says he's the maid’s fiancé, gives his side of the story to The Daily Beast.
One of the most important and controversial characters in the complicated—some would say crumbling—criminal case in New York against erstwhile French presidential contender Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone convicted on a drug charge and held in an Arizona detention center. Although police and prosecutors have kept the detainee’s identity secret, Newsweek/The Daily Beast has now identified the man as Amara Tarawally, 35, and yesterday spoke with him at length.
Richard Drew / AP Photo
Through the fog of Tarawally’s many dubious claims and denials emerges the picture of a man used to manipulating women for his own ends, perhaps to include the 32-year-old African immigrant chambermaid who accused Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault and attempted rape at the Manhattan Sofitel on May 14. Tarawally calls her his "fiancée." There is no indication, however, that Tarawally or the maid had hatched a premeditated plot.
Tarawally himself was arrested in July 2010 along with another African, a Mexican and a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, according to court records. Tarawally had produced almost $40,000 in cash to buy 114 pounds of marijuana from a man who turned out to be a police informant in Chandler, Arizona.
After a plea bargain, in which three felony charges were dropped and Tarawally copped to conspiracy to possess a large amount of cannabis, he served nine months in jail and was put on probation but immediately turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Tarawally is now behind the cinderblock walls and concertina-wire fences of a detention center in the desert town of Eloy, Arizona, awaiting a deportation decision.
It was partly because of the maid’s relationship with Tarawally that her credibility took a massive hit late last month and it looked for a while as if prosecutors might be forced to drop the case against Strauss-Kahn, who until recently led the International Monetary Fund. By the end of June, they had already found out that the maid had lied on her 2004 application for asylum in the United States and on tax forms claimed two children, instead of the one she actually has. They knew that tens of thousands of dollars from mysterious sources had been moved through the maid’s bank accounts. But some investigators saw the phone conversation that she had with Tarawally as the biggest disaster for their case.
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