The hotel maid who accuses International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her is a 32-year-old immigrant from Guinea who told her brother, "somebody has done something really bad to me," according to media reports.
Her identity has been withheld in U.S. media publications, in accordance with standard journalistic practice. But media outlets in France, where Strauss-Kahn is from, began reporting her name Tuesday.
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 from the west African nation of Guinea and is of the Fulani ethnic group. She is a 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.
"She is a good Muslim. She is really pretty, like many Fulani women, but in our culture, we do not accept this type of aggression," a cousin of the woman told slate.fr.
The New York Times reported she was granted asylum seven years ago, is a widow and speaks French and some English.
The woman phoned her older brother in New York about an hour after the alleged sexual assault and said, "Somebody has done something really bad to me. I've been attacked," the .
Strauss-Kahn was under a suicide watch in jail at New York's Rikers Island. The 62-year-old managing director of the IMF was arrested Saturday and is being held without bail. Through his lawyers, he has denied any wrongdoing.
The woman has said through her lawyer that she had no idea who he was when she reported him to the police.
She told her brother in the phone call that her attacker twice tried to force himself on her inside a bedroom in a suite at the Sofitel hotel where she worked.
"No family should have to go through this," the woman's brother told the Daily Mail. "She is a hard-working woman who is just a victim. She is a wonderful West African immigrant who just wants to work hard."
The brother said that he wanted to see Strauss-Kahn face a trial if he pleaded not guilty. "I trust the American justice system and will let it do what it has to do," he told the newspaper.
Relatives of the woman strongly denied accusations that she was part of a larger scheme aimed at discrediting Strauss-Kahn, a prominent politician in France’s Socialist Party who had been considered a front-runner 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,” a relative told Slate.fr. “She has no right to vote in the U.S. and does not even participate in our Guinean political associations."
The woman's attorney, Jeffrey Shapiro, said Tuesday that "her life has been turned upside down." The woman is in seclusion but cooperating with prosecutors and police, Shapiro said.
"She can't go home. She can't go to work," he said.