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In a sparse living room adorned with only a few family photos and Islamic texts, the brother of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser says he has barely slept or eaten in days.
“I heard the news on the radio, and honestly, I do not know what happened. I want to speak to my sister,” said Mamoudou, the woman’s stricken sibling, at his home in the Labe region of Guinea.
His hamlet of 20 dwellings — lost in the rural depths of this impoverished West African nation — has no electricity or running water, and villagers struggle to survive on subsistence farming.
But the brother, whose last name and village are being withheld to protect the identity of the alleged sex-assault victim, insisted that neither his sister nor their family can be bought to make the case go away.
“In our family, we are above material things,” said Mamoudou, who is around 50.
“Even if you are a billionaire, we don’t care. The most important thing for us is how you follow God’s path.”
His comments, published by Reuters yesterday, came on the heels of a Post report that Strauss-Kahn’s pals have secretly contacted relatives of the Manhattan maid in Africa hoping they could pull off just such a payoff.
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Mamoudou said he and his family are devout Muslims, and religion — not money — provides solace for them for troubles far away and for poverty at home.
He said he had not heard from his younger sister for several years but he is sure she is the 32-year-old Guinean widow and Sofitel hotel maid who accused the multimillionaire French politician of sexually attacking her earlier this month.
Mamoudou points to a slightly out-of-focus photograph on the living-room wall of a young woman — his sister — in traditional West African dress looking at the camera, with little expression.
“After the death of her husband . . . she left the village because none of his brothers was old enough to marry her,” Mamoudou said, referring to the common local practice of widows marrying a brother of their late husband.
Since Mamoudou is the eldest of their parents’ six children, it fell on him to ensure his younger sister was cared for.
“That’s when I took her to Bambeto to learn to sew,” he said, referring to a suburb of the capital, where the young widow was given the chance to learn a trade that could feed her and her child.
“[She] never created any problems for this family,” Mamoudou said. “She was the quiet one. That’s how she was brought up.”
From Conakry, his sister and her then-young daughter made their way to the United States some years ago. The child is now 15.
Mamoudou’s sister had been working at the Sofitel in Times Square for three years when Strauss-Kahn allegedly forced her to perform oral sex in his hotel suite on a Saturday around noon, just before he checked out.
Mamoudou said the family’s background — being strictly religious and living in a country where workers earn an average $1 a day — has made it especially difficult for them to understand what’s going on.
Their father was known locally as an Islamic scholar, Mamoudou said, and that background has made it doubly hard to relate to the world of global finance, luxury hotels and lurid allegations of sexual misconduct in which his sister has found herself embroiled.
“We have trouble understanding all this because it is not something we are used to,” he said.
But “if my sister is saying what she is saying, given how she was brought up, I believe her,” the loyal brother added. Reuters, Post Staff