Interview With Eman al- Obeidi; New Video Surfaces in Dominique Strauss-Kahn Case
MALVEAUX: So, she borrowed money for a one-way ticket to Washington, and when I met Eman al-Obeidi at the Libyan Embassy, she just had $40 in her pocket. She said she was desperate. Her journey has been a difficult one. How can you forget this? You may recall in the middle of Libya's violent civil war, Eman's story came to embody the cruelty of the Gadhafi regime. Now, back in March, Eman burst into a crowded Tripoli hotel room screaming she had been raped by Gadhafi soldiers. Government security forces dragged her out of the hotel to an unknown destination and attacked the journalists who tried to help her. She was called a drunk, a whore, by Gadhafi's government. But, for others, she was the face of defiance.</s>EMAN AL-OBEIDI, ALLEGED LIBYAN RAPE VICTIM: I usually get harassed when I have to show my identification card to government officials somewhere. And they find out who I am and that I've put complaints forward against Gadhafi's people. They humiliate me to the point where other people gather around and start saying that it's shameful to treat a Libyan woman that way. It is the same thing every day.</s>MALVEAUX: And so she fled, bouncing from country to country. And finally, she found asylum here in the United States. But her journey is not over. This is the first time that we've heard from her since she arrived in the United States, and in our exclusive interview, Eman al-Obeidi tells me about her life here, her struggles to recover from the brutalities of the attack in Libya, and her efforts to move on here in the states.</s>AL-OBEIDI (through translator): When I came, I never imagined life would be this hard. There's nothing easy. You have to work. You have to work. I mean, as we say in Libya, you have to kill yourself working just to survive. And I wish there even was work. The state I'm in seems cut off. There are no work opportunities. I have been going to the employment office for four months.</s>MALVEAUX: Do you have any support from your family?</s>AL-OBEIDI: My family supports me. I've been here for four months, and without the aid they send me every month, I could not have survived. Three hundred dollars a month can do nothing.</s>MALVEAUX: What would you like to do? Would you like to go back to your family in Libya?</s>AL-OBEIDI: I am sure everyone wants to return back to their own country, but I'm not mentally ready for that. I also feel personally I'm not ready to integrate back into the society. I feel life for me is hard because everything is so different, from culture to language.</s>MALVEAUX: Eman says that the pain right now is too great to go back to Libya. But this is not her home either. And I asked her a number of things, including about Gadhafi's death and what she's going to do next. We're going to bring you more of my exclusive conversation with Eman al-Obeidi. That is on Monday, only in the CNN NEWSROOM. So, if you thought you had heard the last of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's sexual assault case, think again. New video now turning up from New York's Sofitel hotel. And prosecutors in New York dropped the case against the former International Monetary Fund chief when they determined that his accuser wasn't a credible witness. Jim Bittermann reports that both sides now claim that these new images support their version of what really happened.</s>JIM BITTERMANN, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The security camera video from the Sofitel hotel was obtained by French broadcaster BFM Television and has not been seen in public before. It appears to show the rather casual departure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the hotel about 20 minutes after he is alleged to have sexually assaulted a room maid, Nafissatou Diallo, in contrast to the description used by the authorities at the time that the former director of the International Monetary Fund fled the scene. BFM will not say where it obtained the footage, but the alleged victim, Diallo, is seen in several sequences very clearly. In one before the police arrived, she is rather passively sitting in a hotel corridor with two men described by BFM as her boss and a hotel security officer. In another, almost an hour after the alleged assault, she is more animated. Her lawyers say she is describing what happened. Thereafter, the two men are seen in another room doing a 12-second hand-slapping routine, although without audio it's impossible to say what they're celebrating. Finally, the police arrive to take charge of the affair. As you can imagine, there have been a number of reactions to the release of the video, with lawyers for Diallo claiming it supports their case, while Strauss-Kahn's attorneys have already said that the so-called "celebration dance" raises serious questions about what was going on at the hotel. The Accor Group, the owners of the Sofitel, says that their release of the video extracts, as it calls them, unnecessarily exposes employees to media curiosity, and that any idea that the hotel was involved in the plot is nonsense. Jim Bittermann, CNN, Paris.</s>MALVEAUX: Americans are actually getting poorer. We're going to tell you why households across the country are not worth as much as they were just months ago.