Summary
In four tight episodes, Room 2806: The Accusation lays out a complex but relatively complete picture of a high-profile case.
Despite it being the holiday season and thus a chance for Netflix to stuff the streaming stockings full of seasonal content, there’s always room on the Big N for a true-crime docuseries. The latest is Room 2806: The Accusation, an unusually brief but tightly-constructed examination of the sexual assault case leveled against French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011.
Strauss-Kahn, or DSK, was the Managing Director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or at least he was until he resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting Ms. Nafissatou Diallo, a housekeeper at the Sofitel hotel in New York. This was at the zenith of his political career, you understand, as he was being considered a likely presidential candidate, so accusing such a man of rape and sexual assault was no small matter.
Room 2806 recognizes the need here for a certain degree of balance, of approaching the same subject from multiple angles and viewpoints and backing those viewpoints with credible evidence or at least plausible theories for its absence. I should note that Strauss-Kahn has been accused of this kind of thing more than once and tends to be reliably acquitted, as he was here, and as all wealthy, politically-connected people tend to be, but that isn’t to say that an ostensibly factual docuseries should necessarily pick sides if it wants to present a complete portrait of events.
Within the usual assemblage of interviews and archival materials, including the involvement of members of Strauss-Kahn’s inner circle, in its limited runtime Room 2806 makes an obvious effort to round out the story in a clear and concise way. A range of subjects were interviewed, both the prosecution and the defense are well catered to, suspense is capably built where necessary, and there is enough insight provided for viewers to draw their own conclusions. I know where I stand, and you’ll know where you stand, and perhaps that’s how it should be.
A lot of Room 2806: The Accusation is in subtitled French, but there’s nothing lost in translation here. True-crime – or true-accusations-of-crime, as might be more fitting here – are popular purely because of their universality, and despite Strauss-Kahn’s political prominence this isn’t really a story of politics, but of power, the accumulation or absence of which is integral to all of us, everywhere.
