News Desk

D.S.K. and American Justice

D.S.K. and American Justice

The first French reaction to the stunning news in the D.S.K. case was predictably mixed between those who seemed a little mournful at seeing the man slip out of the noose again, and those who saw it as a proof positive of what they had been saying all along about the low standards and brutal blindness of what passes in America for justice. His rivals for the French socialist Presidential nomination claimed to be hardly able to contain their pleasure at the idea of seeing their good friend vindicated, as they were always sure he would be. “I speak as the friend of Dominique Strauss-Kahn this morning. I would say that the news from American press this morning gives me immense joy, as it does all the friends of Dominique,” announced Martine Aubry, his onetime rival, while François Hollande, who had emerged as the favorite since D.S.K.’s disappearance, said that he hoped we would now see dropped “all those charges which had weighed so heavily, so cruelly, on him.” It was left to Hollande’s erstwhile partner, Ségolène Royal, to say that it was “too precipitous” to say anything about his return to the race for President.

Le Monde, meanwhile, which considers itself every bit as much the paper of record and rectitude as the Times does here, nonetheless ran a long story about the accuser, not only naming her (and supplying the pseudonym she used at her job) but detailing a great deal about the terms of her work, and the specific untruth that led the police to suspect her. (It seems to do no harm to say that it involved identifying a boyfriend as a brother.) The case against naming, not to mention shaming, rape victims is so transparent to us that it is rather shocking to see the other side, all invisible here, rendered in such detail—just as, to be sure, it is rather shocking, when in France, to be reminded that here we take knowing the details of the private life of public people for granted. One lesson of the whole case is that, when it comes to mores and morals, the world is still a lot less globalized than it can sometimes look.

Of course, that his accuser would turn out to have feet of clay, or a dubious tongue, does not prove that what she said in this instance is false. It shows only and merely that prosecutors recognize that she would have no credibility in a case that absolutely requires her having some. Nor does it make Strauss-Kahn’s behavior, which certainly seems to have involved a sordid act in a strange setting, suddenly admirable. “No man of power who uses his power in any way to have sex with a hotel maid should be called good,” a firm-minded feminist of my close acquaintance announced at midnight when the news got out, while a generation-Z feminist, only eleven but firm of conviction, and born in Paris, too, said that “if this man is now elected President, I will never again think of France as a moral country.”

Fair enough. But surely it does suggest, ahem, enough ambiguity in motive and action to shame just a little all those who rushed into hysterical generalizations—of the kind that crazed anti-Catholics once projected into monasteries and nunneries—in which French social life was represented as a kind of perpetual orgy in which champagne-swilling members of the caviar gauche giggled as chambermaids were raped and men of power expected to be regularly supplied with supine third-world women. In the midst of the affair, I happened to see the Liam Neeson movie “Taken,” in which, in all seriousness, it is proposed to an American audience that American teen-age girls on a journey to Paris are regularly kidnapped into white slavery by slavering Frenchmen within twenty minutes of their arrival at De Gaulle, and where, again right in central Paris, the French then auction them off in a ritzy hotel to still more slavering Arabs. This kind of thing is funny, I suppose, until it isn’t.

There were those, it should be said, who had whispered all along that the details of the story had never added up. Could a naked, aging unarmed man of sixty-something compel anyone to have sex with him, especially that kind? But the natural, or merely recent, urge to trust the victim made such skepticism harder to register in public. Still, the reaction in the tabloid press here, and not only in the tabloid press, was not muted, sorrowful, and cautious—recognizing that a serious accusation had been made and deserved serious investigation. The reaction, let us be honest, was a wholesale public auto da fé of a man who, as I said at the time, had a reputation for sordid behavior but not for assault. It was ruthless and cruel, and lacked not only the minimal compassion even a seemingly guilty man should get, but any sense at all of what justice is and ought to be. What has happened now ought to vindicate those, Bernard-Henri Lévy high among them, who at the time of D.S.K.’s arrest expressed the unexampled thought that when someone is accused of something it might make sense to wait until the accusation is fully explored and tested before rushing to judgment, and that not every word the police or an accuser says should be treated as holy writ in advance of a trial—and were themselves sneered at and pilloried for saying so. At a minimum, the story should remind us why there should never be a public perp walk of anyone merely accused of a crime. (Or after his conviction, either, for that matter. Dignity counts even in damnation.)

As to its political effects in France; well, nationalism remains the strongest force in French politics, as it does in our own. Throughout the affair, I used to ask friends, puzzled by the French reluctance to instantly join in the damnation of D.S.K., to try a small thought experiment: imagine that Sarah Palin, on holiday in Paris shortly before announcing for the Presidency, was arrested for shoplifting from a store on the Rue St. Honore, then marched around in handcuffs and imprisoned in the Santé. Even her harshest critics in America would say that while that she was known to covet lots of nice things—“Wasilla hillbillies looting Nieman Marcus” and all that—no one ever thought she would steal. Then imagine that the French papers and television had kept up a steady diet of mockery and abuse, wildly generalizing about the American illness of greed and acquisitiveness, describing America as a country where theft was always smiled on so long as the thief was sufficiently powerful—just look at Wall Street, etc. And then imagine that all the charges were dropped after her accuser turns out to have a long history of deceit. Ask yourself, in all honesty: What would her admirers say after her release?

And so Strauss-Kahn? Screwed by the American authorities, traduced by the Murdoch press, saved by his wife and then set free … it’s not a bad platform (even if misleadingly spoken) to run on. But one wonders if his appetite for the thing might be gone. For the rest of us, well, a smart schismatic rabbi once said a very wise thing about stones and sins, which, in a country that we’re often told is rooted in his sect, might be worth remembering. For that matter my own father, sort of a wise schismatic rabbi himself, though with a smaller school, used to say that the surest rule in life is that there is no plank so thin that it doesn’t have two sides. The trouble, of course, is that we can see only one at a time.

Photograph by Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images.