Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK

by Edward Jay Epstein

A veteran journalist continues his “exhaustively researched” (The Guardian) investigation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Here investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein casts fresh doubt on the events surrounding a now-infamous sexual encounter between Dominique Strauss-Kahn—better know by his initials, “DSK”—and a Guinean-born maid at New York’s Sofitel hotel. Epstein shows that DSK, then managing director at the IMF and a leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France, was under close surveillance both before and after the incident. Just two days before, French authorities intercepted a sensitive phone conversation with DSK in Washington, DC. It looks as if he was carrying his own a smart phone. The surveillance also continued to New as Epstein shows, the staff of the Sofitel can be seen watching DSK throughout his stay. Also examined is DSK’s BlackBerry cell phone, which was likely compromised by French intelligence. Just before DSK left the Sofitel, the phone went missing, and it has never been found. Included in this ebook edition is a collection of documents related to the case, including key-card records (tracking who entered DSK’s suite) and never-before-released CCTV surveillance footage. DSK also goes on the record about the case for the first time with an American journalist. Epstein shows that if there was a conspiracy against DSK, as many now believe, it was an after-the-fact one in which DSK's political opponents learned of the sexual incident at the Sofitel through surveillance and shaped it into a major scandal that changed the course of French politics.

Genres: Crime, History, France

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 27, 2012

About the author

Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) was an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Epstein wrote two other books about the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992). His books Legend (1978) and Deception (1989) drew on interviews with retired CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, and his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was an expose of the diamond industry and its economic impact in southern Africa.

Reviews

[Ryan Holiday]

I am a HUGE fan of Epstein's other books (The Hollywood Economist 2.0: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood, and etc.) and his newest on the notorious Dominique Strauss-Kahn maid affair scandal is no different. Like the rest of his books and articles, it's meticulously researched, well-written, and far-reaching. Epstein is a journalist in the grandest, most modest, most impressive sense of the word.

I would read him on any subject. His look into the new landscape of politics, subterfuge, and who and what shapes the biggest choices made in Hollywood and politics should be emulated.

[Laurent]

wow, that's a story

[April23]

Old-fashioned, concise and factual writing.
Despite some rythminc repetitiveness, it was refreshing to read if not for the story, for the style of writing alone.