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The sexual assault prosecution of Dominique Strauss-Kahn had not even been dropped before the French Socialist party celebrations began. Martine Aubry, who may be the party's candidate against Nicolas Sarkozy in nine months' time, described the New York court's decision as an "immense relief" and declared that "we were all waiting for this, for him to finally be able to get out of this nightmare". François Hollande, Mme Aubry's main rival, agreed that "a man with the abilities of Dominique Strauss-Kahn can be useful". And Harlem Désir, the party's interim general secretary, expressed satisfaction at a "happy outcome". What kind of world do these leaders of the Socialist party live in? No one who reads the original prosecution complaint against Mr Strauss-Kahn and the New York prosecutors' 25-page request for the case to be dismissed could possibly make such reckless remarks. Yesterday's dismissal did not find that no sexual encounter occurred between the ex-head of the IMF and the hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo. There was reliable forensic evidence of a real and rapid encounter, and Ms Diallo quickly reported the incident. The case ended because it had become a "he-said-she-said" dispute and because Ms Diallo's reliability as a witness had collapsed. As the prosecutors put it: "The nature and number of the complainant's falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever the truth may be about the encounter between the complainant and the defendant." The outcome, as so often in rape cases, should cause not "immense relief" but immense unease. To drop the case against Mr Strauss-Kahn was nevertheless the right legal decision. But it does not justify the wholly inappropriate tone of vindication expressed by so many French Socialists and it does not justify the tendency of so much of the French governing class to debate the DSK affair as a purely political event devoid of moral content. Mr Strauss-Kahn is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but he has not been exonerated, as a commentator on French television falsely claimed last night. He has been freed on a technicality, albeit a vital one. Mr Strauss-Kahn's modernising roles in the often difficult debates in the post-Mitterrand Socialist party and, more recently, his work as an innovative head of the IMF in crucial times deserve real credit. But his public career is over. It should not be resuscitated. He cannot again command the respect required by a senior minister, let alone a head of state. One Berlusconi is enough. A rehabilitation of Mr Strauss-Kahn would dishonour the French left. The Socialist party has enough problems without humiliating itself in such a disturbing manner.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: left without honour | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Even the French won’t vote for Dominique Strauss-Kahn now - Telegraph

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Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out of jail, but is he out of the woods? The leaders of the French Socialist party may profess “satisfaction that justice was finally served in New York”, and claim that Strauss-Kahn can still take up his career where he left it, before that unfortunate incident with the chambermaid and the rape accusation. But don’t believe a word of it. True, many French people still buy the various conspiracy theories peddled on internet forums about DSK’s downfall. Sarkozy did it. No, Putin did. No, it was Wall Street, because as director-general of the International Monetary Fund, DSK wanted to regulate the banks. (The fact that nobody suspects his main rivals within his party, François Hollande and Martine Aubry, of being organised enough to arrange a foreign honeytrap may not bode well for their chances in 2012.) The French can tolerate a lot from their politicians, as long as they remain discreet. Like old-style wives, the voters would rather be lied to than hear the blunt truth, because at least it shows that their leaders want to keep a vestige of the relationship alive. What has hurt DSK – and the reason why 61 per cent of the public believe his career is over, against 35 per cent who have kept the faith – is not the sex, but the lifestyle. His lawyer’s version of the events in that Sofitel hotel might be tawdry: a 10-minute consensual encounter with a hotel chambermaid, sandwiched between a telephone call to his wife in Paris and a lunch date with his daughter in mid-town Manhattan. But what sticks in the craw of crisis-hit France are the revelations about his money. DSK’s camp has long known this is his Achilles’ heel: they once sued a newspaper for reporting that he’d bought some £5,000 suits from a Washington tailor. But now the public has been regaled with tales of the vast wealth of the Socialist statesman’s TV-star, heiress wife; the elegant houses and apartments in five different cities; the £35,000-a-month townhouse rented for the duration of the New York court case; the $100 steaks delivered to his door during his enforced sojourn; the $600 pasta dinner (with truffle shavings) at Madonna’s favourite Italian bistro to celebrate the return of his bail cheque. Related Articles Strauss-Kahn case dismissed 23 Aug 2011 Strauss-Kahn 'could return to French politics' 22 Aug 2011 Strauss-Kahn charges 'dropped' 21 Aug 2011 Strauss-Kahn to reject plea deal 21 Aug 2011 US and EU 'dangerously close to recession' 19 Aug 2011 Autonomy shares rocket but HP's drop on deal news 19 Aug 2011 “A Socialist doesn’t live like this”, say the comments – indeed, Sarkozy earned himself the title of the “the bling-bling president” for far less. And Sarko’s much-derided love for yacht-owning friends and Rolex watches pales besides the Strauss-Kahns’ conspicuous consumption: “Next to Anne Sinclair” – aka Mrs DSK – “Carla is on benefits,” a gleeful president reportedly told his friends. Of course, the sex issue has had an impact. It is significant that this week’s news that prosecutors have dropped the sexual assault charges was welcomed with relieved statements from male politicians on both sides of the spectrum, and criticism from their female counterparts. The defence minister, Gérard Longuet, said the whole affair had been “a terrible waste – such a brilliant man deserved better”. Jean-François Copé, the Gaullist party chief, expressed (a possibly disingenuous) “happiness for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was targeted by a harsh judicial procedure”. Meanwhile, the Communist MP Marie-Georges Buffet called the DA’s decision “bad news for justice and for women” – for once agreeing with her Gaullist colleague in the House, Françoise Hostalier. DSK’s reputation has also taken a battering from the French press, as newspapers, perhaps ashamed of having ignored his personal life for so long, came up with a series of uncharacteristic revelations. Le Monde subscribers spluttered into their espressos in June when they read a full-page story that included the name of the swingers’ club where DSK was an habitué, or excerpts from a police report on his being caught with a prostitute in a parked car in the Bois de Boulogne in 2007. The French have a strong stomach, but this may have tested it too far. DSK’s spinners have now switched to full attack mode, believing that this is their last chance to rebuild their man’s tattered reputation. Both Le Monde and Le Journal du Dimanche have come out with competing accounts (worthy of Sylvie Krin herself) of the torment endured over the past three months by DSK and his wife, cloistered in their luxury New York pad. It’s so ham-fisted and overblown that you’d think it was really sponsored by his Socialist rivals, cottoning on at last to the fact that his support in any capacity in the upcoming presidential race might come as the kiss of death. The spin doctors seem to think that dubbing Anne Sinclair “Mother Courage” and DSK “the homeless, harsh exile, treated like a pariah”, who “spent his prison days… solving complicated mathematical equations or playing chess on his iPad” will decisively tip public opinion in his favour once more. Somehow, it doesn’t seem likely.

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I agree with both articles, in general.

I doubt that the money is really the problem for DSK. The difference between his wealth and Sarko ain't the point. Sarko is 'bling bling' because he behaves like a chav who just got the keys to a Burberry store. DSK was overall fairly discreet and tasteful about it all. Becoming a socialist isn't the same as taking vows of poverty.

However, I think that what was damaging is that he hasn't been cleared/exonerated in the slightest indeed. And, on the contrary, all discoveries about his past antics tend to show he is capable of rape. Being a seducer, even an aggressive one, is one thing. But the more aggressive you wish to be, the better you have to be at reading the signs of consent your partner(s) send. It's a pretty fine line and any mistake will definitely push you into the sexual assault/rape territory.

It doesn't look like DSK gave too much of a shit about his partners' consent. That's unacceptable. Far more than a $600 dinner. God knows that such bills can be achieved easily enough in a good restaurant if you throw in a couple of vine bottles...

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I doubt that the money is really the problem for DSK. The difference between his wealth and Sarko ain't the point. Sarko is 'bling bling' because he behaves like a chav who just got the keys to a Burberry store. DSK was overall fairly discreet and tasteful about it all.

Raping the help and then blowing $$$ on steaks and truffles? You and I have... different ideas of discretion.

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Becoming a socialist isn't the same as taking vows of poverty.

Sure, but I can't remember a single incidence of him even pretending to give a fuck about the poor either. Bill Gates is more of a socialist. Realistically speaking it's just a banner under which he can campaign for his own advancement.

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However, I think that what was damaging is that he hasn't been cleared/exonerated in the slightest indeed. And, on the contrary, all discoveries about his past antics tend to show he is capable of rape. Being a seducer, even an aggressive one, is one thing. But the more aggressive you wish to be, the better you have to be at reading the signs of consent your partner(s) send. It's a pretty fine line and any mistake will definitely push you into the sexual assault/rape territory. It doesn't look like DSK gave too much of a shit about his partners' consent. That's unacceptable. Far more than a $600 dinner. God knows that such bills can be achieved easily enough in a good restaurant if you throw in a couple of vine bottles

All in all, the rape doesn't bother me that much. Sure he's a slimeball for dragging her character through the mud afterwards, but hey, survival and all that. Sucks to be her, but she could have guessed this sort of thing would happen.

All in all, I'd still rather vote for DSK than anyone else in the PS, but that says more about them than it does about him.

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This stinks. I don't see how it is the prosecustion's duty t determine whether her story stood up to beyond reasonable doubt, that would surely be for the jury to decide. And seeing as HIS character would have been brought just as much under scrutiny, its not at all clear to me that she would have lost. This looks all too much like assuming the honour of the great and the good cannot be impuned by a peasant.

As for the rest:
"Labour's unspoken election promise is that they can run capitalism for the rich better than the Conservatives can. New Labour portray themselves as a management team waiting to take over an ailing company. What we've got, and what we've always had, is two parties supporting the status quo. Our democracy is but a name. We vote. What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats; We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." - Helen Keller, 1911 letter to British suffragists

Originally Posted by Zichao

Raping the help and then blowing $$$ on steaks and truffles? You and I have... different ideas of discretion.

Okay. What should he have done after raping the help, as you put it? I mean, I don't see what he could do that would alleviate that...

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Sure, but I can't remember a single incidence of him even pretending to give a fuck about the poor either. Bill Gates is more of a socialist. Realistically speaking it's just a banner under which he can campaign for his own advancement.

Entirely possible, although I find Bill Gates' involvement in charity suspiciously "late in the day" kind of thing.

OTOH, DSK's policies were mostly within the socialist's broad spectrum. He may not be terribly inventive, he may be center left but I don't recall him trying to transform France into "more like the US/the 19thC", which is basically the Right premise.

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All in all, the rape doesn't bother me that much.

?! What would disqualify someone for running for office in your eyes? Would mass murder and serial killing be enough? If you don't mind me saying, you're taking a very fatalistic approach to things these days.

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Sure he's a slimeball for dragging her character through the mud afterwards, but hey, survival and all that.

Well, yes, that part is kind of normal.

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Sucks to be her, but she could have guessed this sort of thing would happen.

She should have expected being raped? I am not sure I follow...

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Originally Posted by contracycle

This stinks. I don't see how it is the prosecustion's duty t determine whether her story stood up to beyond reasonable doubt, that would surely be for the jury to decide.

OTOH, prosecutions in the US seems to be about batting averages & they tend to dislike the costs, financial and career-wise, associated with prosecuting losing cases...

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And seeing as HIS character would have been brought just as much under scrutiny, its not at all clear to me that she would have lost.

Presumption of innocence. "He-says-she-says" ought to mean the accused party always get the upper hand.

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This looks all too much like assuming the honour of the great and the good cannot be impuned by a peasant.

Well, the great and the good is going to have to hide and forget about all those honours for a good long while so clearly his honour has been impuned by a peasant. That's just the slant you want to give to things because that's what you thought it was all about already at the beginning...

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"Labour's unspoken election promise is that they can run capitalism for the rich better than the Conservatives can. New Labour portray themselves as a management team waiting to take over an ailing company. What we've got, and what we've always had, is two parties supporting the status quo. Our democracy is but a name. We vote. What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats; We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee."[/I] - Helen Keller, 1911 letter to British suffragists

This, I oscillate between "obviously" and "deluded paranoia". The obvious bit is that, of course, legitimate political parties working within the established rule of laws are going to support the status quo. If they didn't, they'd be rebels/revolutionaries/terrorists.

The deluded paranoia bit is the idea that, if you don't get a bloody revolution, all the incremental changes and improvement to quality of life means shit. Well, I think you'll find out it actually matters.

New Labour may have done fuck all for the working & middle classes and may have let the tippy top of the upper class run riots but one thing they did do was help the very bottom of society - the underclass.

Now, we may think that's useless anyhow and that, in any case, the strategy of a Labour party should be concentrated on helping first the working and middle classes but that's another topic for discussion.

The reality is that New Labour, flawed and useless as it was, did do something different for a deprived segment of the population than what the other party would have done.

Hence, they aren't the same.

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

OTOH, prosecutions in the US seems to be about batting averages & they tend to dislike the costs, financial and career-wise, associated with prosecuting losing cases...

Well then justice exists only for those who can afford it.

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Presumption of innocence. "He-says-she-says" ought to mean the accused party always get the upper hand.

Nobody has contested the physical evidence. Presumption of innocence doesn't imply that his version of events has to be accepted without challnge.

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Well, the great and the good is going to have to hide and forget about all those honours for a good long while so clearly his honour has been impuned by a peasant. That's just the slant you want to give to things because that's what you thought it was all about already at the beginning...

The celebratory tone by his colleagues doesn't suggest they will have to at all. And for the latter, I don't know what you mean. I haven't imposed any fixed interpretation on this,
sorry saga.

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The deluded paranoia bit is the idea that, if you don't get a bloody revolution, all the incremental changes and improvement to quality of life means shit. Well, I think you'll find out it actually matters.

And for the thousandth time, nobody said anything about "bloody". But yes, all the reformist stuff is indeed shit. None of those incremental changes were able, for example, to prevent wages stagnating as they have for decades, were they?

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New Labour may have done fuck all for the working & middle classes and may have let the tippy top of the upper class run riots but one thing they did do was help the very bottom of society - the underclass.

There is no "underclass". That's a meaningless word.

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The reality is that New Labour, flawed and useless as it was, did do something different for a deprived segment of the population than what the other party would have done. Hence, they aren't the same.

Not really. I'll agree that NL weren;t as bad as the Tories, but the reality is they are part of the same managerialist, centrist trend that seeks, precisely as Keller said, only to run capitalism better. There are no ideas, no critique of the status quo, no attempt to change anything. So unless you think the world is perfect and unimprovable, they are worthless.

DSK: a trial of the accuser not the accused

The Strauss-Kahn case proves that only a woman who has led a life as sheltered as Rapunzel makes a convincing rape victim

Hadley Freeman
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 August 2011 20.00 BST


Maybe one day, in the pitiless light of hindsight, it will become clear why a woman's false statements about her immigration status, made years ago, were deemed more pertinent to an accusation of attempted rape than the vaginal bruising she allegedly incurred during the encounter itself.

To be fair, it was not just the fact that Nafissatou Diallo made false claims about her background that undermined her credibility to the point that on Monday the Manhattan district attorney decided to tell the judge to drop the charges Diallo made against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. There were other factors, and not just those proffered by Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, who argued – wrongly – that economists don't commit sex crimes, and, of course, friend to all famous male victims of the American justice system, Bernard-Henri Lévy. He insisted – also wrongly – that "grand hotels" always send in "a cleaning brigade".

Diallo has been shown to have told lies in her life, certainly. None of these lies, though, had anything to do with her version of what happened in room 2806 in the Sofitel, a version that has been backed up by forensic evidence.

First, her lie about her immigration status was that she had been – gotcha! – gang raped. But the reason she lied then was that she thought it would help her gain political asylum. Her motivation for doing so now is decidedly less clear. The much- repeated story about her telling a friend on the phone that she was planning to bilk Strauss-Kahn has since been rubbished by her lawyer as a poor translation, and anyway, her actions since suggest she is the world's worst blackmailer. When she waived her right to anonymity, she not only gave the defence more material to mine for inconsistencies but gained no money and risked – heck, guaranteed – damaging her personal reputation and employment prospects for life. Moreover, she sure won't be able to try that ol' rape accusation trick on any other unsuspecting man. She did not think this plan through.

Her recall (under great emotional stress, whether she was lying or not) of the chronology of what happened precisely after the alleged assault altered slightly and that was offered up as further proof of her unreliability and, as far as I know, there is no definitive guide to how anyone behaves after a sexual assault.

A French attorney told the Guardian on Monday that "It's not that he [the DA] doesn't believe her, it's that he doesn't believe her to be a good victim." A woman who gets intoxicated can be raped. Prostitutes can be raped. And a poor woman who has told lies can be raped. In fact, it is often the women who "don't make good victims" who are most at risk because they are the most vulnerable, and it is these women who are least likely to be listened to.

Diallo's past proved to be more incriminating than Strauss-Kahn's, a man with an infamously predatory reputation towards women, and who has since been accused of another sexual assault by a French writer. In an interview with the Swiss magazine L'illustré, a former mistress of Strauss-Kahn said that Diallo's description of how he grabbed her "encouraged me to believe this woman". But all too often in rape cases, the principle of presumption of innocence for the accused tips into assumption of guilt for the accuser.

Rape accusations – like abortions, or becoming a single mother – are not something most women do for a lark, squeezing them in between mani-pedis and Pilates or, in the case of Diallo, cleaning another man's toilet. That Diallo lied about a rape in order to gain asylum in America where she has since been so humiliated by a "sexual encounter" is just one of the bitter ironies here.

Despite the efforts of the DA and Strauss-Kahn's defence team, a trial most certainly did happen: it just happened to be a trial of the accuser rather than the accused. Strauss-Khan has denied the allegations, and what occurred in room 2806 will never be known. What has been proved, on an international scale, is that only women who have led lives as sheltered as Rapunzel and have memory recall as robotic as computers are capable of being raped. The rest are money- grabbing sluts with vaginal bruising.

DSK: a trial of the accuser not the accused | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian

Originally Posted by contracycle

Well then justice exists only for those who can afford it.

Not per se. They probably would have declined to prosecute the case of that French journalist too. And she certainly wasn't from an underprivileged background...

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Nobody has contested the physical evidence. Presumption of innocence doesn't imply that his version of events has to be accepted without challenge.

Does the physical evidence establish that a rape took place beyond doubt. If no, then we do have to accept that he cannot be convicted while respecting the presumption of innocence. It sucks - but as the first article quoted by Z says, "it's the right legal decision"...

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The celebratory tone by his colleagues doesn't suggest they will have to at all.

We shall see. IMO, that just shows how out-of-touch those assholes are... But, if the Socialists really associate with him, imho, they'll just ruin whatever chances they have...

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And for the latter, I don't know what you mean. I haven't imposed any fixed interpretation on this sorry saga.

Your first post on the previous thread about the subject was a cartoon showing a third worlder in a slum, with the implied "they're getting raped by the IMF every day"... Your second was a Guardian article about "Don't let Dominique Strauss-Kahn become the victim"...

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And for the thousandth time, nobody said anything about "bloody".

I am just going with historical statistics.

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But yes, all the reformist stuff is indeed shit. None of those incremental changes were able, for example, to prevent wages stagnating as they have for decades, were they?

Actually, it was all that reformist stuff that allowed wages to rise in the first place. There simply hasn't been any reformist stuff [on the left] in the last 3 decades, with a couple of usually ill-thought exceptions. The Right on the other hand has been definitely very very active, bringing us back one step at a time...

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There is no "underclass". That's a meaningless word.

Says you. Sorry but you're not the Merriam Weber dictionary all by yourself. Underclass - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The way I would define it is the class of people who have never legitimately worked and have no real prospect of doing so. People who will need constant rather than temporary assistance. As I've said before, I've been unemployed for a bit more than one year once. I am not about to spit in the soup. State support pretty much saved me then. But the thing is, it's not like I had dropped out of school at 16, never learned a trade, never worked, been in trouble with the law etc. That's underclass. I was just unemployed.

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Not really. I'll agree that NL weren;t as bad as the Tories, but the reality is they are part of the same managerialist, centrist trend that seeks, precisely as Keller said, only to run capitalism better. There are no ideas, no critique of the status quo, no attempt to change anything. So unless you think the world is perfect and unimprovable, they are worthless.

Well, I am happy with capitalism so all I want is indeed to have it run better. And the fact that it can be run better (or worse) show that the world is neither perfect nor unimprovable. Indeed, as seen in the last 3 decades, things can definitely be made worse very very easily...

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