The former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was recently accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in a New York City hotel room.
The accused victim Nafissatou Diallo is revealing her true identity in her first television interview, below.
Strauss-Kahn denies all allegations and has adamantly maintained his innocence, yet Diallo insists she is not fabricating the story.
Take a look at the interview below. Do you see any hot spots? Do you think that Diallo is being truthful?
More on the interview and story can be found here
She doesn’t convince me at all..
at 0:40 when she’s talking about what happened she looks like happy.
at 1:30 there’s a micro-expression of fear in the eyes? i think that she lying when she said that she never seen strauss-khan before.
Finally at 3:20 there is maybe an hot spot? the interviewers ask :”are you a prostitute?” while she answers “I’m not” there her head says “yes” .
Finally i can’t totally believe her because i think that she’s hiding somethings to us.
What do you think?
when she is talkin she laughs in a complicity way means she lies about it
and the manipulators when she swear by God
she is not totally liying is an interesting case
I can’t reach a conclusion from just this brief clip. The editing is too disjointed and there just isn’t enough to form a solid opinion for me.
I will say that I see some hot spots and I do question her story, but I’m not convinced enough by what I see in this clip to say that there isn’t any truth to her claims at all. I would have to see more because some of what I see can be explained by her apparent personality and isn’t as conclusive (to me) as it might appear to be.
I would also prefer to see Strauss-Kahn’s side before I reach a real conclusion. Purely statistically speaking, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle in this case, and each side has probably exaggerated or embellished to make their own side look a little better.
This story is an excellent one for those who study deception detection, because it really requires a lot of the more advanced knowledge and understanding of deception to uncover the truth. So many cases are a lot more obvious than this one is, but this story has so many variables at play, it’s really more tricky than it might appear on its surface in my opinion.
If there was an attempted rape wouldnt someone else that worked in the hotel,another maid for example, notice that something was wrong? An event like that, idont think, would not go unnoticed to everyone in any workplace.
If you have managed to escape an attempted rape do you continue your workday and just go to clean the next room and then go BACK to the room that you almost got raped? If you watch the interwiev in the link, that’s what they found when checking her key card activity.
First I agree with Gianluca with the happiness and the head nod. The happiness at the beginning of the clip was interesting. There was something definitely off with her demeanor. I would like to see more videos of her explaining how everything happened in the hotel. I also wonder if the statement I haven’t been called a prostitute “since I was born” has a different meaning.
Keith makes a particularly good point when saying that he can’t reach a solid conclusion without watching more than this brief clip. It would be great to see the whole interview and to know more about Strauss-Kahn’s side as well.
There are some definite hot spots: how she seems to be more emotional when speaking about when she found out who Strauss-Kahn really was than recounting the details of the alleged assault. Also the head nod when asked if she is a prostitute (good catch Gianluca!)
However, there are moments when she shows genuine sadness, where her brows are coming up and together, lips are drooped down and she has tears in her eyes. There are moments where she shows genuine fear.
The story seems much more complicated that just this brief interview and it would be great to see more from this woman.
Thank you Admin.
And this is another mistake I’ve seen people make when they’re still familiarizing themselves with the various and sundry techniques and issues of deception detection. We have two words, true and lie. This belies the complexity of deception detection because although there are only two words, it isn’t a binary problem (there are more than two words but I’ll leave that for another time because it muddies the lesson here).
We know that if something is the truth, that it isn’t a lie.
We know that if something is a lie, that it isn’t the truth.
This makes it appear as if it’s an either/or, or single domain, black and white, binary problem. But here is why it’s not.
If you know someone has told you the truth, then you also know the truth because they’ve told you– that’s two pieces of information. On the other side, if you know someone has lied to you, then you know you do not know the truth (insofar as what they’ve told you). That is also two pieces of information but those two pieces don’t include the truth, so we’re already dealing with at least a two domain problem and deception is no longer binary or black and white. Simply identifying when someone has lied to you doesn’t simultaneously provide you with the truth (other than the truth that you’ve been lied to by someone). The truth is something you have to pursue separately.
So to apply the above to this case, let’s take those hot spots we’ve identified above and say they mean she has indeed lied for the purpose of the exercise. Does this mean no sexual assault took place?
It does not mean no sexual assault took place. There are legitimate reasons that a person in this woman’s position might tell lies when recounting what took place, including some reasons that do not negate a sexual assault having taken place.
When she found out who this man was, and looked at her own (potentially) checkered past, she may have realized that if she just came out and said exactly what did take place (let’s say an actual sexual assault– or unwanted/unsolicited sexual activity) that her past might stand in the way of justice being carried out. She said that she wants justice in this case, and if we take that to be true, then right there we have a potential motivation to lie in her recounting of an event which– again, for the purpose of this exercise– actually took place.
What this means is, while we may be able to identify deception in this clip, we cannot rule out a sexual assault having taken place based solely on what’s contained in this clip. (And there’s the difference between using this for a novice level example and using it for an advanced level example.)
It is often possible to discover the truth using deception detection techniques in video clips like this, but not with this little information in a case with as many complications as we have here. There is only enough information to say “likely deceptive” or “likely truthful” but not enough information to say “sexual assault occurred” or “sexual assault did not occur”. And that’s one more reason this particular example is so interesting from an educational standpoint. Not only can some of her hot spots (potentially) be explained by her personality, but “deceptive vs. truthful” isn’t an adequate conclusion in this case either.
I really see this as one of the best “advanced deception detection” examples I’ve come across in my year and a half of experience– it’s incredibly intricate and nuanced!