Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Accuser's Incarcerated Fiance Identified

By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Posted on Wed Jul 13, 2011 at 06:45:10 PM EST
Tags: Dominque Strauss-Kahn (all tags)

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Major props to Christine Pelisek, Terry Greene Sterling and Christopher Dickey of The Daily Beast, who discovered the identity of the jailed fiance/husband of the hotel maid in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. He is Amara Tarawally, 35. Yesterday, Daily Beast reporters interviewed him at the Arizona immigration center.

Tarawally himself was arrested in July 2010 along with another African, a Mexican, and a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, according to court records. Tarawally had produced almost $40,000 in cash to buy 114 pounds of marijuana from a man who turned out to be a police informant in Chandler, Arizona.

After a plea bargain, in which three felony charges were dropped and Tarawally copped to conspiracy to possess a large amount of cannabis, he served nine months in jail and was put on probation but immediately turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Tarawally is now behind the cinderblock walls and concertina-wire fences of a detention center in the desert town of Eloy, Arizona, awaiting a deportation decision.

The accuser's phone call in a Fulani dialect with Tarawally the day after the encounter with DSK may be the biggest problem for the state's case. Prosecutors believe she told him not to worry, she knew what she was doing and the man she accused had a lot of money. [More...]

From the interview, it sounds like Mr. Tarawally is quite the scammer when it comes to women. He appears to have two fiances and a wife from whom he is not yet divorced. The Daily Beast also interviewed his other fiance, Sonja Hill, a cosmetologist in Phoenix. She said she's been with Tarawally for about four years, and they began living together about four months before his 2010 arrent. Tarawally told the Daily Beast he and his wife, who lives in New York, have a five year son together.

Is the accuser another one of his victims?

But through the fog of Tarawally’s many dubious claims and denials emerges the picture of a man used to manipulating women for his own ends, perhaps to include the 32-year-old African immigrant chambermaid who accused Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault and attempted rape at the Manhattan Sofitel on May 14.

Tarawally presents some new credibility issues for the accuser. He denied he made bank deposits to her bank account. The New York Times said she told authorities when confronted with the deposits, that he must have made them. Whi