Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

The narrative being that Africans don't really lie, they just have an alternative vision of reality - just wait until Thompson explains that in open court

Three months ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was one of the world's most powerful bankers and even had his eye on the Presidency of France. In a matter of weeks, he has been arrested, charged with serious sexual offences, forced to resign from his job and then suddenly, in a stunning reversal, released from his onerous bail conditions. By last weekend, the plot had begun to resemble a Greek drama with DSK as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, readying himself for the most astonishing of political resurrections in the final act.

Enter, stage left, a young French journalist called Tristane Banon. It isn't her first appearance in the piece but, just as one set of charges against the former head of the IMF appears to be on the point of collapse, she has taken over the role of his potential Nemesis. Two days ago, Banon filed a criminal complaint in which she alleged that Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her in 2002. This has been greeted with everything from total incredulity to a muted acknowledgement that assumptions about DSK's swift return to frontline politics in France were premature.

Why, demand his most loyal supporters, did Banon wait nine years to file a case? They believe that men like DSK, who are widely regarded as "grands seducteurs" in France, are vulnerable to false accusations by women who've misunderstood their intentions or exploited their weakness. This certainly isn't how it looks from the standpoint of people who work for organisations that support victims; the disbelief that has greeted Banon's complaint is common in sexual assault cases, reflecting a series of mistaken assumptions or "rape myths" about how victims behave.

First, it's not unusual for victims to wait years before they feel able to report their experience; in this instance Banon confided in her mother Anne Mansouret, a Socialist councillor, at the time of the alleged assault. DSK was a hugely powerful figure in the French Socialist party, a former finance minister and potential presidential candidate, and Mansouret talked her daughter out of making a formal complaint, a course of action she now says she regrets.

But in 2007 Banon appeared on a TV show and said she had been attacked five years earlier by a politician whom she went to interview at his apartment. DSK's name was bleeped out on transmission, but it is clear that Banon's accusation long pre-dates his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York.

Nor is it unusual for victims to take action only when events appear to suggest that another woman has been attacked by the same assailant. It's often only when a woman realises that her experience wasn't an isolated incident that she goes to the police. In the most extreme British example, more than 100 women have come forward to identify themselves as possible victims of the Black Cab rapist, John Worboys, since he was convicted of attacks on 12 women in 2009.

Police or prosecutors sometimes decide an alleged victim wouldn't make a good witness, but that doesn't mean an assault didn't take place. Le Monde reported yesterday that the director of the Crime Victims Treatment Centre at St Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in Harlem, who examined DSK's first accuser on the day of the alleged assault, found her "in a state of shock, very shaken, very affected.... I didn't doubt her testimony". It now seems unlikely that events in Suite 2806 at the New York Sofitel will ever be scrutinised in court, which is the proper place for such conflicting accounts to be tested. Instead, attention has switched to Banon, whose mother says she took the decision to file a complaint against DSK after "maturely reflecting". The messy drama has yet to reach its finale, but DSK would be foolish to underestimate his latest adversary

- Lawyers for the woman accusing ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault asked the lead New York prosecutor Wednesday to step down from the case and appoint a special prosecutor, AFP reported.

At question were damaging leaks by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office that forced prosecutors to admit they had serious doubts about the credibility of the 32-year-old Guinean-born hotel maid who accused Strauss-Kahn.

"District Attorney Vance, we ask in earnest that your office voluntarily recuse itself from the Strauss-Kahn case and that you appoint a special prosecutor," the woman's lawyer Kenneth Thompson wrote in a letter to the district attorney.

In his letter, Thompson also spoke of a "potential conflict of interest" by Vance's office because the head of the prosecutor's trial division is married to one of Strauss-Kahn's lawyers involved in the case, and no prosecutors had informed the accuser's team of such.

The lawyer said he first learned about that relationship in a newspaper article last month.

"We should have been told about this matter by members of your office and not by members of the press," Thompson wrote.

He noted that one of the prosecutors had "screamed at and disrespected the victim while she met with them," and was still assigned to the case, which Thompson said "gives us great concern about whether your office can truly determine what is in the interest of justice."

Erin M. Duggan, chief spokeswoman for the Manhattan DA's Office, later released a statement rejecting the assertions put forward by Thompson.

"Tonight the District Attorney's Office received a letter from reporters, distributed via a public relations firm and purportedly from Mr. Thompson. We strongly disagree with how the Office and the work of the Assistant District Attorneys have been characterized. Any suggestion that this Office should be recused is wholly without merit," the statement said.

Like Ruth Marcus I'm surprised and puzzled by the arguments of William Saletan and Peter Beinart, who find much to admire in the conduct of the DSK prosecution. One reason I'm puzzled is that we still don't know the truth of what happened--any more than we knew the truth when the "perp" was first shown to the cameras for his ritual pre-trial punishment. It's a little early to declare, "Truth will out. Didn't our system do well?"

"What the collapse of this case proves is that it's possible to distinguish true rape accusations from false ones..." says Saletan. So now we know what's true and false about the accusations? Who needs an actual trial? Think of the savings.



Perhaps the media were a little over-excited, but let's not get carried away here. "The New York tabloids acted like the New York tabloids," says Beinart, so what's the problem? This is the problem. If it had been only the tabloids, they would still have been wrong, but it wasn't just them. The full spectrum of US media, from top to bottom, sank with them to the gutter. Some were more salacious than others, but almost everybody presumed and luxuriated in DSK's guilt.

Beinart is also impressed that the DSK prosecutors disclosed their findings about the accuser. Only in America! He says the usual thing in other countries is for police and prosecution to suppress such evidence. News to me. Name me a developed country where failure to disclose exculpatory evidence is tolerated, even tacitly.

Marcus rightly complains that the prosecution's tactics were needlessly aggressive--but I'd go further and say this issue is systemic in high-profile US cases. These are often political events. Political ambitions are on the line (I'm talking about the ambitions of the prosecutor). The politicization of criminal justice may not be a uniquely American phenomenon, but it is far from the norm in Europe, for instance. Cases like DSK's underline the dangers. Prosecutors aim to make a name for themselves, and strengthen their hand at trial into the bargain, by manipulating public opinion outside the courtroom. The defense does what it can in response. The media are delighted to publish or broadcast it all.

In Britain, much of this would be contempt of court and against the law. Even if the demands of free speech override the presumption of innocence--not a position I would want to defend--the DSK circus was nothing to be proud of.

Many theories have emerged about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. For those convinced of the innocence of the former International Monetary Fund chief, suspicions abound that it was all a set-up. The latest such "complot" is focused on the apparent lack of cooperation from the Accor hotel chain, which owns the Manhattan Sofitel, where a chambermaid says Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her.
The French-owned Accor Company has always refused any requests from Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers Benjamin Brafman and Bill Taylor about the hotel staff’s schedules and room-cleaning protocols.
This complete lack of cooperation has raised suspicion among some top members of the French Socialist party, for which Strauss-Kahn was a leading contender to run as the candidate to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy for President. Some have questioned whether the company could have ties with Sarkozy's party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).
Claude Guéant, the French Interior Minister and close Sarkozy ally, recently responded to long-unanswered questions about the affair. He claims that he was informed about Strauss-Kahn's arrest by his own Chief of Staff, who had himself had been informed by Ange Mancini, the current Coordinator of Intelligence for President Nicolas Sarkozy. And therein lies the suspicion: Mancini had apparently been informed of the arrest by his friend René-Georges Querry, the Accor group Head of Security, also a former chief of the French Anti-Gang Brigades (BRI).
Accor group executives insist they “had nothing to do” with Strauss-Kahn's arrest. However, information like this still feeds conspiracy theories suggesting Strauss-Kahn might have been set up and that members of the Accor group were in touch with members of the French government

The only problem with that conspiracy theory is if I was going to set him up I would not had used a third world maid who story came apart in so rapid a manner as my agent for doing so.

It’s been a memorable summer for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. – but not a particularly happy one.

In the space of 30 days, his office lost two high-profile court trials and appears to have bungled a third case, the sensational allegation that Dominique Strauss-Kahn – former International Monetary Fund managing director and Socialist aspirant to France’s highest elected office – tried to rape a Sofitel hotel chamber maid.

The latter dossier is now expected to be dropped, after investigators belatedly discovered that the key witness, a 32-year-old African immigrant, lied about her past and her actions in the minutes after the alleged sexual assault, raising questions about her credibility.

For Mr. Vance, elected 17 months ago to succeed the long-serving (35 years) Robert Morgenthau, 91, the handling of the Strauss-Kahn affair brought a barrage of criticism and demands that he recuse himself from the case.

That is not about to happen.

Indeed, while some critics have lamented the D.A.’s approach to what’s become known in France as “l’affaire DSK,” most criminal-law experts say Mr. Vance, 56, has had very little room to manoeuvre and has acted properly.

“Reasonable minds will differ on this, but I can understand moving forward as they did, particularly if they had confidence in the facts,” says Columbia University criminal-law professor Daniel Richman. “I won’t say [charging him] was right or wrong, but it’s an understandable judgment when you’re operating on a knife edge, [you] want to avoid giving preferential treatment to someone like Strauss-Kahn, and want to avoid what I think was a very real flight risk.”

In fact, adds Fordham University criminal-law professor Martha Rayner, “while we may have the presumption of innocence in this country, as it played out in the DSK affair, there is almost always a rush to judgment because charges usually have to be brought before a judge within 24 hours and the ability to do in-depth investigations is limited.”

Her Fordham colleague, James Cohen, agrees, noting that the U.S. legal system has never operated on the principle of “investigate first and charge later. That’s not how we do it. We don’t typically investigate the complainants until we get close to trial.”

If anything, Ms. Rayner says, Mr. Strauss-Kahn received preferential treatment from the district attorney. “For the clients I often represent – the indigent – you are denied bail, you sit in jail, you can lose your job, your house and custody of your children, and no further investigation is conducted until the trial.”

In this instance, clearly, significant resources were brought to bear on the accuser. “If our system operated the way it should,” Ms. Rayner says, “that kind of care and attention should go into every case.”

As soon as Mr. Vance received new information, raising doubts about the witness’s credibility – having lied on her asylum application about being gang-raped in Guinea – he disclosed it to defence counsel and applied for a court hearing. Mr. Strauss-Kahn was subsequently released from his stringent bail conditions.

“Personally,” Prof. Cohen says, “I think he [Mr. Vance] is doing a fine job.”

The glare of media klieg lights is not unknown to Mr. Vance, son of the late lawyer and diplomat Cyrus Vance, who served as secretary of state under president Jimmy Carter.

Before returning to his native New York in 2004, where he became a partner at Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer, he spent 16 years in Seattle, working as the lead defence lawyer in a series of headline-grabbing cases.

And it is difficult to imagine making the phone call to the boyfriend in the prison without the knowledge that it would be being listened to and thus a potential vehicle for misleading those who bug phone calls whilst imagining nobody is aware they are doing it and on which imaginings the credibility of what is said is posited.