French Media Outlets Broadcast DSK Accuser’s Identity

For more coverage of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, click here.

A number of French-language media outlets on Tuesday began reporting the name of the woman accusing IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her in a New York City hotel room over the weekend.

Among the outlets to identify the woman by name are: Paris Match, radio station RMC, Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genève, and Slate.fr.

Slate.fr is a French website that is editorially independent from Slate, although Slate does own 15 percent of it.

Slate.fr, citing relatives of the accuser, reports that the woman is a legal immigrant who originally hails from the African nation of Guinea. She is a 32-year-old Muslim who has been living in the U.S. since 1998, when she followed her then husband to the United States. The pair later divorced, according to the report, and the woman is now a single parent of a 15-year-old daughter.

The family says that the accuser has been taken by the New York Police Department to an undisclosed location to shield her from the media.

The family also strongly denied accusations that the woman was part of a larger scheme aimed at discrediting Strauss-Kahn, a prominent politician in France’s Socialist Party who had been widely considered a frontrunner to unseat President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"No, no, no! People must understand that … [She] is part of the Guinean Fulani community, and she is not interested in politics,” one of the relatives told Slate.fr. “She has no right to vote in the U.S. and does not even participate in our Guinean political associations."

For more coverage of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, click here.