by PAM MARTENS
To women working in the shadows around the world, she embodies the spirits of Anita Hill, Norma Rae and Rosa Parks. She has done for hotel room attendants what the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 did to expose sweatshop conditions for garment workers. In summoning the courage to charge Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the powerful then-chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and lead aspirant to the Elysée Palace as the next President of France, with sexually assaulting her in his $3,000 a night suite at the midtown Manhattan Sofitel Hotel, the widowed 32-year old hotel housekeeper born in a mud hut in Guinea, is igniting critical global dialogues. The topics are as diverse as French trivialization of violent sexual assault, needed legislation to provide panic alerts for hotel room attendants in danger, and the structural austerity imposed on struggling nations by the IMF as a thinly disguised economic rape.
This young woman who came to the U.S. just seven years ago has done all this without uttering a word in public. By testifying repeatedly to law enforcement on the alleged sexual crimes committed against her by this powerful and politically connected man and agreeing to testify in a criminal trial in open court, she has put on international display her confidence that America will vindicate her belief that it cares about justice for every human being, regardless of ethnicity or station in life.
But in recent days concerns have grown about the sudden upheaval in the housekeeper’s legal team. The growing fear is that the next global topic for debate will be the monetization of rape in America.
The woman about whom so much has been written in the press is ironically someone who has essentially been stripped of an identity: she has no first or last name to most of the American people; her whereabouts is unknown; she can’t resume her normal work life. There is no evidence that her colleagues at the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council union are able to stay in touch with her and provide her a support network. According to the New York Times, her brothers in Guinea have been unable to reach her on her cell phone.
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