Nafissatou Diallo and her attorney (Getty Images)

In her column in the Nation, Patricia J. Williams writes that a weak case rather than a lack of justice hurt Nafissatou Diallo's suit against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

… Media accounts suggested that Diallo's suit was dismissed because of her "questionable past," but that wasn't what weakened the case most. It was that she lied to prosecutors again and again and again. The fact that she falsely claimed on her asylum application to have been gang-raped in Guinea probably wasn't enough to doom the case — she might still have presented herself quite sympathetically as a desperate refugee fleeing a war zone — but there were other things undermining her credibility.

Diallo repeatedly confused or misrepresented crucial sequences of events to the grand jury, to police and to prosecutors. Not only did the police investigation turn up a jumble of discrepancies in her story; her own attorney permitted her, even advised her, to talk and talk and talk to all manner of tabloid media hounds. That rather unusual — I would say reckless — decision captured yet more discrepancies for the record and diminished her reliability further …

Read Patricia J. Williams' entire column at the Nation.