The Sofitel Hotel, like many modern hotels, has high-tech electronic locks on its guest rooms. Electronic cards are issued to both employees and guests. To open a locked room, a guest or employee swipes this key card in the lock. The lock then records the card’s registration number and the time of entry to the nearest minute. The time of entry is then stored in the hotel’s computer along with, if the card is that of an employee, his or her name and department. The computer printout, which is available to the hotel’s managerial and security staff, would therefore reveal the times (within one minute) that anyone used a key to enter the presidential suite and the rooms across from it, including room 2820, on May 13 and May 14, 2011.
These key records provide a temporal map of the activities in the presidential suite. DSK arrived at 7:13 P.M. on May 13. Afterward, only five people entered the suite. One was DSK, who went out for dinner and reentered the suite at 1:53 A.M. As the lobby CCTV cameras show, he was with a blond woman who left two hours later. The four other people who entered on May 14 were the room-service waiter Haque, who used his key at 12:05 P.M.; the maid Diallo, who used her key three times between 12:06 and 12:16 P.M.; the head housekeeper Markozani, who used her key at 12:38 P.M.; and the head engineer Yearwood, who used his key twice, at 12:45 P.M. and at 12:51 P.M.
The key records for room 2820 across the hall show that on May 14, aside from the guest, only Diallo used a key to enter the room prior to the arrival of the police, and she did so three times.
If these telltale records had been available to the prosecutors when they first questioned Diallo, the case might have taken a different direction. But the prosecutors did not obtain them until more than a month later, for reasons that remain unclear. When analyzed, they produce three intriguing mysteries.
The Unidentified Visitors
DSK arrived at the Sofitel on the evening of May 13. At 7:13 P.M., after checking in, he used his newly issued electronic key to enter the presidential suite on the 28th floor. The suite had been prepared for him earlier in the afternoon, and the maid on duty, O.Y. Fong, had turned down the bed at 5:47 P.M. Then, at 6:13 P.M., just as DSK’s plane was landing at the airport, a person entered the suite using the electronic key belonging to a Sofitel employee named A.C. Chowdhury. The hotel’s personnel records, however, show that Chowdhury was not working that evening. If so, an unknown person used an employee’s ID to gain entry. At 6:54 P.M., there was another unidentified entry by a person using the generic “HK1” key, kept in the housekeeping department. This key does not identify the individual.
The Mystery of the Double Entry
A maid cannot clean a hotel room without the cleaning equipment on his or her cart. For that reason, a maid normally takes a cart to the room he or she is about to clean and leaves it parked outside the door of the room while cleaning it. On May 14, however, Diallo did not have her cart when she went to the presidential suite after noon. It will be recalled that she had left it in the room on the other side of the elevator bank, room 2820, where it remained until 12:26 P.M. Yet the key records show that Diallo entered the presidential suite not once but twice within a minute at 12:06 P.M. She entered the first time, according to her account, because a room-service waiter told her that the room was empty. Since the electronic key records do not record seconds, we do not know how much time she spent on her first visit or how much time she spent in the hall afterward.
The room-service waiter, Syed Haque, who had entered it only one minute or less before her first entry, may possibly have still been in the suite. He told prosecutors that he had entered the suite to remove the breakfast dishes. These dishes were in the dining room at the far end of the suite. Wherever Haque was at 12:06 P.M., Diallo did not remain long after that first entry. It is also possible that she met someone else outside the suite between her first and second visits.
If she still intended to clean the room, she needed her cart of cleaning equipment. But she did not get that equipment. Instead, she returned to the presidential suite without it again. Whatever reason she had for returning to the room, she did so without the means to clean it.
The Mystery of Room 2820
If the prosecutors had been given the key records on May 14, room 2820 might have been less of a mystery. It would then have been made part of the crime scene. As such, it would have been processed for fingerprints, DNA, and other possible evidence, and an effort would have been made to identify who was in it. The reason that it was not so processed, as the prosecutors state in a footnote to their report, was that Diallo initially was untruthful to the police, as well as the prosecutors and grand jury, about her presence in room 2820. It was not until late June that the prosecutors learned that Diallo had gone into room 2820, and, by that time, the room had been rented out many times, and it was too late to find evidence. Prosecutors found her concealment of her presence “inexplicable.” In doing so, she prevented the police from searching room 2820. It was not only Diallo who did not provide the authorities with this information about room 2820. The hotel staff could have ascertained from the computerized records that Diallo had used her key to enter the room four times that day.
Then prosecutors learned that Diallo had gone into room 2820 after the encounter. On June 28, 2011, when prosecutors then re-questioned her about it, as they noted in their motion for dismissal, she “admitted for the first time that she had been untruthful about this key point.” She then provided them with a detailed version of her entry into room 2820. Diallo now said that after the alleged assault in the presidential suite, she ran out the door and had “gone directly” into room 2820. As the prosecutors established that the alleged assault had ended at about 12:13 P.M., and it takes just a few seconds to cross the hallway, this meant that if this version was true, she had entered 2820 just after 12:13 P.M. She then said that she vacuumed and cleaned that room. While that would account for her whereabouts, there was no electronic key-swipe record of her entering at 12:13 P.M. And the key records show that the room was locked when she entered at 12:26 P.M. (Maids are not supposed to leave rooms open when they are not there.) Of course, the door could have been opened from the inside, but the occupant had checked out at 11:37 A.M., so if someone opened the door for her, it could not have been he. (The hotel would not identify the registered guest other than to say he was a “French businessman.”) There was no key entry between 11:37 A.M. and 12:26 P.M., so, if Diallo was telling the truth to the prosecutors in June that she ran directly to room 2820 after leaving the presidential suite, an unknown person in room 2820 may have opened the door for her at 12:13 P.M.
The issue became even murkier after Diallo, confronted with the data from the key records, again changed her story. On July 27, 2011, in what prosecutors called “Version 3,” Diallo said that after the incident she had waited in the hall until after she saw DSK leave the floor, which was at 12:26 P.M. Only then did she momentarily go into room 2820 to retrieve her cleaning supplies. Her previous key-swipe entry was at 11:33 A.M. So, according to this version, she had locked her cart with all the equipment she needed to clean the presidential suite in room 2820, even though the occupant had not yet checked out, before going to the presidential suite. But given Diallo’s conflicting accounts, all that we really know for certain is what the electronic key records disclose: Diallo entered room 2820 three times before the registered guest left and once afterward at 12:26 P.M. We don’t know if anyone else was in the room when she was there, why she left her equipment there before the guest had checked out, or, if her June version is true, how the door was opened at 12:13 A.M. without leaving a swipe record.
The Unexplained Time Lapse
There was a gap of well over one hour between the time Diallo had her encounter with DSK and the time that it was reported to the police. She had run out of the presidential suite at, or before, DSK called his daughter at 12:13 P.M. The 911 call by the Sofitel security chief was received at 1:32 P.M., according to the 911 report. This is a 79 minute delay. Part of the gap was due to Diallo not immediately reporting the incident to anyone. First, at 12:26 P.M., as the key-card records show, she briefly went back into the presidential suite but did not stay to clean it. Then, approximately four minutes later, she asked a hypothetical question to another maid, and only when that maid asked whether the hypothetical situation had just happened to Diallo did Diallo state that she had been attacked by the guest in the presidential suite. This allegation was made at 12:30 P.M. But even after her outcry, there was a one-hour delay before the hotel staff reported it to police or attempted to get Diallo any medical attention. As a result, Diallo did not arrive at Roosevelt-St. Luke’s Hospital until 3:57 P.M., nearly four hours after the alleged attack.
We know from CCTV tapes, phone records, and police reports that members of the hotel staff, including the hotel’s head engineer, a security guard, and the head of housekeeping, were heading up to the 28th floor within 10 minutes of her outcry. By 12:37 P.M., according to key records, the head housekeeper and Diallo had reentered the presidential suite. They were joined at 12:45 P.M. by the head engineer and the security guard, and they remained there for approximately five minutes. If Diallo told them the same story she later told police, they knew only that she had been violently attacked by a naked man who came out of the bedroom of the presidential suite at about noon. Since Diallo had not previously seen DSK—she had not been on duty when DSK arrived the previous evening—she could not have known that he, and not an intruder, was the attacker. The hotel staff, according to prosecutors’ documents, did not show her a photograph of DSK until 2:30 P.M., so, when they first heard her story, they could not rule out the possibility that an intruder had gotten into the suite after DSK had left it and attacked her. If that was true, it was possible that a criminal was still lurking in the hotel and could be a danger to others. That was reason enough to call the police immediately. In addition, they had to consider the well-being of their fellow employee. Diallo said she was dragged across a room and molested. Even if there were no visible injuries, she might require immediate medical attention or trauma counseling. The suite had a phone. Yet, instead of calling for police and medical help, they took Diallo downstairs, through the main lobby, and to a bench in the employees’ entranceway across from the security office. Here, without any privacy or comfort, she waited for 50 minutes before the call was finally made.
During this wait, there was no interruption of communications. The CCTV tapes show that both the head engineer and security guard frequently used their cell phones. Yet no one from the hotel’s human resources department, which deals with employee welfare, was brought down to talk to Diallo. If the hotel staff was waiting for some development, what was it?
One possibility is that Diallo was initially unwilling to file a complaint. Such a theory was suggested by Lanny Davis, the Washington lawyer retained by the Sofitel’s owner, the Accor Group, in an interview on NBC’s Today Show in December 2011. Presumably, as the crisis manager for the Sofitel, he had access to its employees. In attempting to explain the weird dance between the security guard and head engineer following the call to the police, Davis said it was possible that the two men were celebrating Diallo’s finally agreeing at 1:30 P.M. “to allow the hotel to call 911.” The implication is that for an hour she had not agreed to such a call. While such a scenario is possible, the prosecutors specifically cited the promptness of her outcry for help as a factor that made them believe her story. If she had been unwilling to make a complaint for over an hour, it raised the question of what or who changed her mind at 1:30 P.M.
Another possibility is that the hotel staff were awaiting authorization from a higher level before calling 911. After all, DSK was a possible future president of France, and making the 911 call would likely involve the French-owned hotel in a major scandal. The CCTV tapes depict the head engineer and security guard almost constantly on their cell phones in the three minutes prior to the 911 call. The cell-phone records also show that Accor’s chief of security in New York called the head engineer at 1:28 P.M. and also sent a text to the hotel manager, who then sped to the hotel on a motor scooter (arriving only seven minutes before the police). A flurry of cell-phone communications preceded the 911 call, and the employees at the hotel could have been influenced by these calls.
The Victory Dance
Ordinarily, a scandal is not good news for a first-class hotel. It is particularly onerous if it involves the arrival of uniformed police in the lobby, authorities subpoenaing CCTV tapes, and the sealing off of VIP rooms with yellow tape as crime scenes. For the security staff, it can also mean many hours of work preparing incident reports and being questioned by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and management. Given such consequences, it is not clear why two hotel employees would engage in the sort of victory dance that would be appropriate after a touchdown in a football game. Yet the security guard and the head engineer at the Sofitel did such a dance following the call to the police. They did not do this dance in the view of others; instead, they went into a loading-dock area, where no one in the security area could see them.
Neither man has offered an explanation for the dance. According to an Accor Group spokesman, they both said their minds were blank on the subject and they could not recall the dance. So we do not know what made both men suddenly go to a private area and dance at 1:34 P.M. We do know that these two men had been working together throughout that day, as can be seen on the CCTV tapes, and that they had many earlier opportunities to high-five each other but didn’t. No significant sports event ended at 1:34 P.M. What did happen at that time was that the 911 dispatcher said she was sending a squad car to the hotel.