Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

They had time to check on rumors of this man character but not to check thier facts with the airline for example?

Strauss-Kahn Accuser Expects Reputation Attack
By Karen Freifeld
May 26, 2011 .

The alleged victim of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s attempted rape and sexual attack hired additional legal counsel in anticipation of an assault on her reputation and credibility, her lawyer said.

Attorney Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson, who prosecuted the New York City police officers for the beating and torture of Abner Louima, have begun to work on behalf of the 32-year-old hotel maid from Guinea, according to Jeffrey Shapiro, who has been representing her.

“We anticipate the defense in this case is going to mount some sort of an assault on her,” Shapiro, a New York personal- injury lawyer, said today in a telephone interview. “It requires a team effort” to protect her, he said.

Siegel and Thompson did not immediately return calls for comment. Shapiro said a civil suit had not been discussed at this point.

The trio met yesterday, and another meeting is planned for tomorrow, Shapiro said. “In any case like this, they will try to discredit her in some manner, so she needs to be protected,” Shapiro said.

The alleged victim is doing well, the lawyer added.

“She’s very strong,” he said. “She’s with her daughter. She’s happy to be done with testifying to the grand jury. She’s going to be okay.”

Bronx Home
The woman has a 15-year-old daughter and, until the incident, they lived in the Bronx.

“She has not been able to go back to work,” Shapiro said. “The hotel has continued to pay her, but that is not a long- term solution. That’s an interim solution.” He said no one else is providing her with support, and that her housing must be dealt with in the long term.

Shapiro said he had no knowledge that anyone had approached the maid’s family in Guinea with offers of money to make the case go away, as the New York Post reported.

William Taylor, a lawyer for Strauss-Kahn, said in a statement yesterday that reports of Strauss-Kahn’s attorneys’ or representatives’ being in contact with the woman or her family are false.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/strauss-kahn-rape-accuser-adds-counsel-expecting-attack-on-her-reputation.html

Even though Banon has fallen silent, her mother is now speaking for her. In an interview with France Three in Haute Normandie, Mansouret confirms “without a doubt” that her daughter was assaulted in 2002. In carefully vetted language, not unlike la langue de bois that DSK used in his first interview with Banon for her book of essays, Mansouret states that her daughter’s attacker “lost his head,” but concedes her own error in thinking that it only was “a moment of wildness” for a man attracted to women. The reporter asks if her daughter regrets not filing a complaint. Anne Mansouret says she doesn’t think so, that she advised her daughter against this, given the friendly relations the families could have had. “I thought that for his family that must have been an extremely difficult period and complex to manage” because otherwise this man was “warm, nice, full of talent.”

What traumatized her daughter most over the course of the years, she said, was that as soon as she had a project, she was hounded by the incident and that there was an “invisible barrier” because people were afraid of what she could eventually reveal. Banon’s journalism career was aborted, her mother says, because no press group would have her, and she began to write fiction. She suffered from depression for a long time. Mansouret states that she is no psychiatrist and is unwilling to judge, but this sort of predatory behavior is a form of violence.

The NYC tabloid newpapers are having a field day over this arrest, particularly the NY Post.

Sexist DSK had France in his pants
By ANDREA PEYSER
May 26, 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn did not act alone. Throughout France, hands are as dirty as those of a chambermaid tasked with scrubbing a $3,000 Sofitel suite.

The upstairs-downstairs saga of the Big Shot who allegedly sexually brutalized the maid did not hatch out of the ether. It is as if the majority of the citizens of France -- locked into 1950s-style notions of sexism, misogyny and racism -- was complicit in the horrific, accused deed.

This is more than a tale about the (now-ex) International Monetary Fund chief and the working gal who cried rape. The sordid affair brings into sharp relief the vast cultural, legal and moral differences between a young United States and a cowardly and decayed France. A nation where the word of a poor, black immigrant is inferior to that of a rich, white knucklehead.

And it has further strained already tenuous relations between the United States and France, that primary spoke in the America-loathing Axis of Weasel, a moniker France earned in 2003 when it betrayed the US and our allies by refusing to support foreign policies.

Yet the French displayed a twisted kind of backbone when its citizens aided and abetted Strauss-Kahn, from his rise as a horny politician to his starring role as alleged perpetrator of a crime that, in this country, is considered a diabolically violent abuse of power.

But to many in France, attempted rape is something quite different: Free love gone bad.

A joke.

If you want to be revolted by a national mindset proudly on display in the Gallic nation, look no further than this hideous nugget penned by social commentator Sophie de Menthon. A woman.

Frenchmen of all political stripes and social castes, she wrote, have "stood there aghast," confronted with images of DSK, as he's affectionately known, handcuffed and under arrest in New York. She went further.

"It creates feelings and reactions which go far beyond what is, essentially, after all just another minor alleged crime."

Minor. Alleged. Crime.

Good Lord. So sexual abuse is but a small hiccup. Like sticking gum under a subway seat. In this worldview, DSK's guilt or innocence is of little consequence. That's because the sexual assault of a poor, powerless lady is nothing at all. But arresting a rich, powerful man is, by definition, the more egregious offense.

Last weekend, a few French feminists -- though the phrase sounds like a contradiction in terms -- came out to protest the misogyny on display in the case of DSK, and victims of sexual assault have just begun to speak up. They won't speak out for long.

Victims might start by muzzling former Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou, now a parliamentarian. She called pics of the man in handcuffs, "incredibly brutal, violent and cruel" -- but uttered not a word in defense of the alleged victim, a cipher.

"A horrible global lynching!" was how Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a leftist French senator, described the images.

Writing in The Daily Beast, DSK's philosopher pal, Bernard-Henri Levy, actually wrote that the judge in the case "pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other." Dang!

"Do you know who I am?" DSK reportedly said while allegedly attacking the maid.

Le Figaro and Paris Match helpfully named not only DSK's alleged victim, but for some reason, her 15-year-old daughter. Le Figaro also made a point of giving the accuser's height -- tall -- as if to prove that the dwarfish DSK couldn't possibly have physically overcome the woman.

As the case proceeds, infuriating revelations emerged that friends of the accused fiend tried to buy off his victim through payments offered to her dirt-poor relatives in Guinea. Proudly, they refused.

All I can say is -- thank goodness Strauss-Kahn is to be tried in America, not France.

I am proud to live in a nation where the word of a poor, frightened maid can be taken seriously, and her wealthy, self-important, accused tormentor can be frog-marched to jail.

Just like any other accused felon.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/sexist_dsk_had_france_in_his_pants_RiAMAsbSsV9594enNROtqM

I am sure that you are having a great time promoting anti French prejudice....

PARIS – The lawyer for a French writer who alleged former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted her eight years ago said Friday she won't file a criminal complaint against him for now.
The comment from David Koubbi, a lawyer for 31-year-old Tristane Banon, in a TV interview came days after he said they were considering a sexual assault complaint against Strauss-Kahn.
"Our decision has been reserved for later for a very simple reason: Neither Tristane Banon or I want to be manipulated by the American justice system, or help out in any way so that these two cases might be linked in one way or another," he told France's BFM Television.
Strauss-Kahn was jailed Saturday after a hotel chambermaid in New York accused him of trying to rape her. He has denied breaking any laws but resigned as International Monetary Fund chief on Thursday. Lawyers posted $1 million bail Friday for Strauss-Kahn as he awaits trial on attempted rape.
The 62-year-old Socialist had been seen previously as a possible contender in France's 2012 presidential election.

Koubbi said he wants to keep his client's case separate.
"It is absolutely out of the question in the Tristane Banon case that a movement on our part could have as consequence the conviction of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the United States," Koubbi added. "If Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn is to be convicted in the United States of America, it will be because of events linked to the American case, which I know nothing about, that I haven't seen — and about which it's not my job to address.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/05/20/french-woman-wont-demand-charges-imf-head/#ixzz1NTwBu1U8

And the columnists in the NY Post aren't given to mincing words either..or hiding which side they are on.

That piece was linked earlier in the thread...way to pay attention.

Quote:

That piece was linked earlier in the thread...way to pay attention.

The piece is dated today...

I would not even trust that it was written for the Post

What did they know?
Some hard questions for France’s elite after Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest
May 26th 2011
PARIS

NEARLY two weeks after Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York on charges of attempted rape and sexual assault, the French are still reeling. Talk about the scandal fills the airwaves and front pages, and not only because it disqualifies from next year’s presidential election the man who many thought would win. The affair, and reactions to it, raise awkward questions about French attitudes to class, women, justice and the political elite.

Everybody knew, but nobody said anything. This appears to be what the torrent of commentary amounts to. The argument is complex, not least because although Mr Strauss-Kahn’s womanising in Paris was legendary, he has been publicly accused of sexual aggression only once: by Tristane Banon, a writer, who said she had to fight him off on the floor when she went to interview him in 2002. She did not press charges at the time, and her lawyer says she will not do so, for now.

What has emerged is a portrait of a political culture in which seduction bordering on harassment is rife. “Sexual harassment is not accepted in the workplace in France—except in politics,” says a former colleague of Mr Strauss-Kahn. “Powerful male politicians put the women they work with under immense pressure.” Cosy ties between politicians and journalists, who—like Mr Strauss-Kahn and Anne Sinclair, an ex-television presenter—often marry each other, contribute to an attitude among the elite that their sophisticated mores can police themselves. Privacy laws, and implicit threats of retribution, prop up the culture of self-censorship. Few harassment claims against politicians reach court.

Yet if Mr Strauss-Kahn’s encounters did overstep the line, the media were not the only complicit party. Fingers are being pointed at the Socialist Party itself. “What exactly did Socialist leaders know about DSK’s private life?” asked Libération, a leftish newspaper, in a damning editorial. Anne Mansouret, Ms Banon’s mother and herself a Socialist politician, said this week that François Hollande, an ex-party boss, knew about the assault and even comforted her daughter at the time. Mr Hollande, a strong runner for the Socialist presidential nomination, replied that he had “no knowledge” of the gravity of the charges.

Yet it stretches credulity for the party to say that it had no inkling. Ms Mansouret now says that she regrets advising her daughter at the time not to press charges. In 2008 another Socialist politician, Aurélie Filippetti, declared that she had decided never to be in a closed room with Mr Strauss-Kahn after he hit on her in a “heavy-handed” way. This week Le Monde reported that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s team had compiled documentary evidence of Mr Strauss-Kahn’s activities. “Everyone turned a blind eye,” says one Socialist who knows him well, “because he was a dream candidate.”

On the left in particular, there seems to be a prevailing code under which to refuse sexual advances, even when unwelcome, is somehow bourgeois. Many grandees reacted to Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrest with horror, not at the accusations, but at the humiliation of an untried powerful figure. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a philosopher who once defended Roman Polanski’s right not to be jailed in America for unlawful sex with a minor, railed against the judge who “pretended to take [DSK] for a subject of justice like any other”. “Nobody died,” snorted Jack Lang, a Socialist ex-culture minister. Few had a good word for the hotel maid; some treated her claims with equal disdain. One left-wing editor, Jean-François Kahn, even dismissed the encounter as a “troussage de domestique”, a reference to an aristocratic entitlement to extract sexual favours from domestic staff. All this leaves the troubling impression of an elite that believes itself exempt from ordinary rules (although both Mr Lang and Mr Kahn apologised for their comments).

In protest, a set of women’s groups organised a weekend march, with banners declaring “We are all chambermaids”. “Sexism in France is prevalent, and rape cases are underreported,” says Linda Ramoul, one of the organisers. “The political elite is totally disconnected.” The business also plays into the hands of Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, who has been one of the few to insist on a “presumption of sincerity” for the chambermaid, and who has railed against the “complicit silence” of the elite about Mr Strauss-Kahn’s “pathological” behaviour.

Could the DSK affair change such attitudes? Possibly, but do not bet on it. This week two ex-employees filed charges of sexual harassment against Georges Tron, a junior minister in Mr Sarkozy’s government; Mr Tron called the allegations “nonsense”. It remains to be seen if the claims go anywhere, but they do not help the right. As it is, Mr Sarkozy has not enjoyed a bounce in the aftermath of Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrest. Polls had suggested the president would have struggled against Mr Strauss-Kahn. Now they say that against either Mr Hollande or Martine Aubry, the Socialists’ leader, he would fare little better.
http://www.economist.com/node/18745425?story_id=18745425&fsrc=rss

But you keep repeating it, as if it's somehow important that we remember.

The French are questioning themselves, Hawkeye.

Through the windows, the spring evening dimmed to black, and the party moved to the dining room, where the stories continued. Earlier that day at the Café de Flore, Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher, had remarked of Strauss-Kahn, “He wasn’t a womanizer—he was sick.” Everyone at the dinner party agreed, and they, too, spoke of Strauss-Kahn in the past tense.

...

To Pascal Bruckner, the photos showed “the face of a libertine” and “a bulldozer.” Strauss-Kahn had never actually declared his candidacy, and in the past he had been such a lacklustre campaigner that Bruckner suspected that he did not actually want to run. “I think his passion was sex, much more than power,” Bruckner said. “I have many women friends in the Socialist Party who have told me stuff about him. It’s dreadful.” He thought Strauss-Kahn’s friends should have encouraged him to seek psychiatric treatment instead of the Presidency

Once in the police station, he was forensically examined, his entire body

Once in the police station, he was forensically examined, his entire body

So that was just another indignity and invasion of privacy that the maid's allegation put him through.

I'll let that sink in for a sec to let your cogs start whirring