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Thursday, December 8, 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn set up on a bogus sex-assault charge.

Hotel CCTV images of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the New York chambermaid who accused him of attempted rape were broadcast by French news channel BFMTV on Thursday. The former IMF chief is shown calmly leaving the Sofitel hotel May 14. Nafissatou Diallo is filmed speaking to hotel security staff, who are in turn seen performing a bizarre celebratory dance. Strauss-Kahn exits the elevator, pays his bill at the front desk and then climbs into a taxi outside in a sequence lasting a matter of minutes. He does not appear to be hurrying or in a distressed state.

Nafissatou Diallo can be seen in a Sofitel hotel corridor gesticulating with a colleague after the alleged rape

Episode caught on surveillance video, French station says

Hotel surveillance footage surfaced Thursday that is likely to fuel suspicion that French philanderer Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up on a bogus sex-assault charge.

The video shows the pervy politician calmly paying his bill and leaving the swanky Sofitel in Manhattan by taxi on the day of the alleged attack — and then cuts to shots of the maid who accused him with hotel security.

Chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo is seen in a corridor gesturing, but it’s not at all clear what she is saying.

But in the next shots, two of the security guys are doing what looks like a victory dance.

Sofitel told the French TV station BFMTV, which broadcast the footage, that the bizarre celebratory dance, which lasts 13 seconds, had nothing to do with Strauss-Kahn or Diallo’s explosive charges.

But Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was the favorite to win the French presidency before he was sunk by the attempted-rape charge, has insisted that the encounter with Diallo was consensual.

And reports in the New York Review of Books and in French media have suggested that the former International Monetary Fund chief was framed by his political enemies.

Diallo, 32, has stuck to her story that she was victimized by a sex predator. She was expected to make a statement later Thursday about the hotel footage.

Strauss-Kahn, a legendary lothario whom the French have nicknamed “the great seducer,” was arrested in May after Diallo told a supervisor that the politician had forced her to perform oral sex on him.

Strauss-Kahn was hauled off a plane at Kennedy Airport just before it departed for Paris and charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with rape.

But the case against DSK began unravelling after Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, was found to have fibbed about being gang-raped in her homeland, about her ties to a convicted drug dealer — and even about how much she was paid to clean hotel rooms.

The DA’s office reluctantly dropped the charge against Strauss-Kahn in August and branded Diallo a liar.

Strauss-Kahn was allowed to return home to Paris. But he still faces a civil suit from Diallo.

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