Two employees of the Sofitel hotel in New York walk into what appears to be a storage room, exchange a few words, and then break into a “dance of joy” – as it is has been termed in the French media – ending with an emphatic shoulder bump. The entire sequence, captured by a Sofitel security camera, lasts barely ten seconds and there is no soundtrack on the video and hence no way of knowing what exactly inspired the two men’s good cheer. Nonetheless, the leaked footage has revived longstanding rumors that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the victim of a “conspiracy” to derail his French presidential aspirations last May, when, on his account, he accepted a Sofitel maid’s generous offer of some quick oral gratification just prior to check-out – and famously found himself arrested and accused of sexual assault a few hours later.

The buzz surrounding the footage was heightened by the publication about a week prior to its release of an “investigative report” by Edward Jay Epstein. Epstein’s report appeared in the New York Review of Books, thus adding an unusual touch of gravitas to his findings. Epstein does not name his sources, but it is obvious that he enjoyed the cooperation of Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers. It was presumably the latter who fed Epstein the evidence cited in his article. After all, who else – apart from the supposedly “incriminated” hotel management – would have had access to Sofitel security camera footage? This makes it all the more curious that Epstein claimed that the allegedly suspicious employee “dance” scene lasted a full three minutes.