The New York Times
July 2, 2011
Frenchwomen Weigh Impact and Fallout of Strauss-Kahn Case
By STEVEN ERLANGER and KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS — Anne Mansouret, the mother of a young woman who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her in 2003, said Saturday that she was “revolted” by the gleeful reaction of many men in France to the news that the case against him in New York had been compromised by credibility questions surrounding his accuser, a hotel housekeeper.
“He’s lied a lot in his life,” said Ms. Mansouret, whose daughter, Tristane Banon, has signaled that she would file a criminal complaint in France against Mr. Strauss-Kahn. “I know exactly what he is.”
“We question automatically this young woman’s testimony,” she said. “But we don’t question a man who lied extravagantly.”
Mr. Strauss-Kahn and his male allies, she said, “don’t want a world where you can’t force a woman” to perform sex acts.
For Ms. Mansouret, who for years had urged her daughter not to speak out because it might damage her career, and other women here, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York in May seemed to be a turning point, a chance to break the code of silence about sexual harassment and aggression by powerful figures. But the question in France after his release without bail on Friday was whether that moment was turning yet again.
Many women took it as a pointed slap when senior figures in the Socialist Party — the mainstream progressive organization in French politics — immediately began speaking of how Mr. Strauss-Kahn might yet run for the presidency even though the felony charges against him had not been dropped.
Lionel Jospin, a Socialist and former prime minister, said Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been “thrown to the wolves” by the Americans. The Socialist legislator Jean-Marie Le Guen, who considers Mr. Strauss-Kahn to be the victim of a plot, said, “I hope he will soon be free and able to look the French people in the eyes once again.”
François Pupponi, a Socialist mayor, said Mr. Strauss-Kahn should now run for president: “Before May 15 everybody considered him the best candidate. He was accused of terrible things. If it turns out he is cleared, why wouldn’t he have the right to be a presidential candidate?”
But Sylvie Kauffmann, the first female editor of Le Monde and a former Washington correspondent for that newspaper, said that there had been a “D.S.K. moment” that would last well beyond the machismo of the political elite.
“I think he’s damaged so badly now, he won’t be able to recover in the minds of voters, especially women voters,” she said. “I wouldn’t vote for him now, but I would have before.”
There is a tendency among men “to pretend that nothing has happened,” she said. “In the establishment mind, this issue is not very important. The political class considers this issue of women and political attitudes toward women not so relevant. But I would bet that the average voter may feel differently.”
Ms. Kauffmann was skeptical about any instant revolution in sexual attitudes in France.
“But this has opened the way to a lot of discussion and debate,” she said.
“There’s an awareness and a willingness to speak out that wasn’t there before. Even if D.S.K. manages to come back and run, it will be part of the discussion,” she said. “He’s still a guy who had a sexual encounter with a maid at noon in a luxury suite before having lunch with his daughter and flying back to his wife.”
Even if the sex was consensual, as Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers say, “we’re back to the Bill Clinton problem,” Ms. Kauffmann said. “D.S.K. might be the brightest guy on the political scene, but it showed a part of his character that is a problem in a campaign and in a presidency.”
Like Ms. Kauffmann, Hélène Périvier, co-director of the gender program at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, agreed that a deeper soul-searching had started about gender relations.
“It raised questions that went well beyond his particular case and that of his guilt,” she said. “People have started raising questions about the relations between men and women in France, and those questions won’t go away.”
But Ms. Périvier, like others, warned that the inconsistencies that have apparently emerged in the account of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s accuser risked discrediting future reports of sexual violence.
“If he gets acquitted, the risk is that next time something like this happens, people will point to the precedent,” she said. False reports of rape and sexual violence are statistically rare, she said, “but it suffices to cement doubts and discredit the word of women going to the police in the future.”
Olivia Cattan runs a feminist association called Paroles de Femmes, or “Women’s Words.” She said she had received insulting comments on her Web site from those who said that French feminists had been too quick to defend the housekeeper who accused Mr. Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her “and should have remained silent.” She said she was surprised by the reaction of many Socialists.
“They give the impression that they will welcome him as a hero,” she said.
She is sure Mr. Strauss-Kahn will lose support among many voters if he runs. But what worries her more is that “victims of rape who take legal action against their perpetrator will now have to prove that they are moral, don’t have a police record and never lied.” She fears the case “will cast more doubt on the testimony of victims in a country where women’s rights are already ridiculed.”
Natacha Henry, a French writer on women’s issues, was more hopeful. “It is always difficult for the victim to be heard, but it’s better now; it’s changed something in the mentality of French women,” she said.
She pointed to the case of Georges Tron, a junior minister who was accused by women inspired by the Strauss-Kahn prosecution to come forward with charges of attempted rape. Mr. Tron had to resign from the government and now, after an investigation, faces rape charges.
“This case has empowered women, even if this one isn’t the Virgin Mary,” Ms. Henry said of the housekeeper in the New York case. “She’s a real human being who has made mistakes.”
As an example of how things were beginning to change, Ms. Kauffmann pointed to an interview last week in the newspaper Le Parisien with Laurence Parisot, who runs the largest union of employers in France.
“Sexism is racism,” Ms. Parisot said bluntly, speaking openly about the misogyny in French political life and the sexism in many of its enterprises. The interview was widely discussed in the French media and on talk shows. The D.S.K. affair “is going to contribute to liberating speech,” Ms. Parisot said. “No longer fear to speak,” she told young women.
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, director of research at the Center for International Studies and Research at the Institut d’Études Politiques, said the Strauss-Kahn case dominated conversation Saturday morning at the hairdresser’s shop. “The story is a trigger for women to talk more about what they’ve been experiencing in the workplace,” she said. “French society is changing to some extent, but only gradually.”
There has been some criticism of French feminists, especially from men of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s generation. They “are allowing themselves to say particularly ridiculous things, but younger men tend to be different,” Ms. Le Gloannec said. “Salacious comments are now passé, and these people are passé, too, even if they don’t know it.”
Still, she said she would vote for Mr. Strauss-Kahn if she could, describing him as the best of the possible candidates for France. “He may have to learn to be more cautious,” she said. “This is his family problem, with his daughter and his wife.”
Geneviève Fraisse, a former member of the European Parliament and well-known philosopher and historian of the sexes, expressed cautious hope. “This debate is with us to stay,” she said. “It might change a little after the latest news. It will be a violent debate. But an inroad has been made.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/world/europe/03france.html
