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By Matthew Russell Lee, CJR  Q&A, NY Post

UNITED NATIONS GATE,  NOVEMBER 8 -- As Inner City Press moved forward with its inquiry into UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres' personal use of public funds, silence on slaughter in Cameroon and elsewhere and failure to disclose family members' financial interests in Angola and elsewhere, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric on 20 June 2018 said that “things will soon be getting worse” for Inner City Press' reporter. [Now the mystery of the funding behind his $4 million apartment is getting worse, or at least more murky, see below.]

  Two days after Dujarric's threat this reporter was pushed out of the General Assembly lobby during a speech by Guterres by UN Security Lieutenant Ronald E. Dobbins, who did it again more violently on July 3. Since then Inner City Press has been banned from entering the UN, and Guterres even tried to get Inner City Press ousted from Park East Synagogue twenty blocks north of the UN on October 31.

   As many online have questioned this no due process ouster, including from Cameroon, Japan, the UK, Italy and other places in Europe, we can now report that Dujarric while refusing to answer Inner City Press' and a UN Expert's written questions about how to appeal this lifetime ban has reached out to try to quiet some critics.

Tellingly, while he has entirely ignored for example Anglophone Cameroonian critics regardless of how polite or articulate they are, or how many social media followers they have, Dujarric has reached out to European critics. To these he refers darkly to (his?) staff feeling at risk from Inner City Press' reporting.

   This is how any dictatorship would try to justifying physically assaulting and banning a reporter - say that the journalist's reporting made unnamed people feel unsafe in unspecified ways.

  Yes, Inner City Press named UN officials who took money from now convicted briber Ng Lap Seng, including to provide Ng with falsified General Assembly documents. Is it legitimate for Guterres' UN to oust and ban a media for making briber-takers feel unsafe? There are others: the Patrick Ho trial starts this month.

   Even in Dujarric's private outreach to European critics, he has no evidence. This is why he and USG Alison Smale never offered a hearing or opportunity to be heard: there is no evidence, the charges are Trump-ed up. Smale's deputy claims an article shouldn't have been written about him using audio of what he said at an official stake-out position accepted (at least for other media) by Smale's own Department, which called frivolous the Morocco Mission complaint Smale also used.

  But today we ask: why does Dujarric refuse to response for example to African critics while reaching out to Europeans to say that the banning of Inner City Press should be accepted, that asking the UN questions in person is a privilege? It is because Dujarric himself is privileged. Publicly available records -- don't be scared -- show that Dujarric bought an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side for $3,785,000.

   Now the UN is wasteful - but does it pay its spokesman enough to buy a $4,000,000 apartment? The money, it seemed from public records, came from (where else) an art gallery, the Odyssia Gallery in New York, which among other things produces vanity shows. The NY Times had reported that "Ilaria Skouras Quadrani, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Federico Quadrani of Rome and New York, was married last Monday to Stephane Dujarric de la Riviere, a son of Anka M. Begley of New York and Francois Dujarric de la Riviere of Paris. Msgr. Robert Charlebois performed the ceremony at the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome. Mrs. Dujarric, 24, is a researcher at the Kate Gansz Company, an art dealer in London. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received a master's degree in art history from New York University. Her parents own the Odyssia Gallery in New York."  This Odyssia Gallery, which later published a book (cover photo here) of Ilaria's drawings, has or had as address 305 East 61st Street, Manhattan. But a recent reporter's visit to the site found an empty building. So what IS the source of this spokesman's $4 million apartment?

   It is all very nice, a position from which to target hard working media and try to destroy a shirt, a laptop, a livelihood, all without due process, only later evidence-free excuses provided in private to other European, banning questions from Africa and about the UN's corruption. It is UNacceptable. We'll have more on this.

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