In mid June, the New York Times put together a profile of the housekeeper who had accused powerful French politician Dominique Strauss Kahn of rape.
“In dozens of interviews with people who know her or are familiar with her life, the woman, now 32, is portrayed as an unassuming and hard-working single mother. The interviews were conducted in New York and in her homeland, Guinea, with relatives, neighbors, co-workers and former employers. The woman herself has stayed out of public view in recent weeks and has not spoken to reporters,” is the story’s nut graph.
`’She is a village girl who didn’t go to school to learn English, Greek, Portuguese, what have you,” said her older brother, 49, whose first name is Mamoudou. ”All she learned was the Koran. Can you imagine how on earth she is suffering through this ordeal?”
There are few things more painful that doing a story like this and having it revealed that you couldn’t get people to tell you the truth or that you didn’t dig hard enough.
So the Times went back on the story. Saturday, it published the inside story of how the prosecutors had discovered the woman had lied on her immigration application as well as to them about the incident and many aspects of her life.
Why did the Times reporters not discover any hints of the complications in this story? How would you have reported the story?
I’m not sure it’s correct to state that the reporter couldn’t get people to tell the truth. What’s being called into question is material that was not immediately accessible to the public (immigration papers, phone called to jailed boyfriend). Everything mentioned in this post and original article (village girl, suffering, hard working single mom) has not been disproved. The only way to have had a more nuanced profile would have been to wait.