Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

He is charged with violent felonies. That's not "pretty darn minor

In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, gets to escape his tiresome fiancée and instead talk war and sex with Papa Hemingway, who barks “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” “Who wants to fight?” and “You box?”

Many Frenchmen — not to mention foundering neighbor, the crepuscular Casanova Silvio Berlusconi — may be longing to see that Peugeot time machine come around a cobblestone corner.

Some may yearn to return to a time when manly aggression was celebrated rather than suspected, especially after waking up Tuesday to see the remarkable front page of Libération — photos of six prominent French women in politics with the headline “Marre des machos,” or “Sick of machos.”

“Is this the end of the ordinary misogyny that weighs on French political life?” the paper asked, adding: “Tongues have become untied.”

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim.

As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”

After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.

Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to reverse his spiraling fortunes by shaking off his old reputation as a jumpy and flashy Hot Rabbit and recasting himself as a sober and quiet family man. One newspaper noted that the enduring image from the G-8 summit meeting in Deauville was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in white smock, showing the other leaders’ wives her baby bump.

The French president wasted no time jettisoning a junior minister — also the mayor of Draveil — who was accused of sexual assault by two former employees. Georges Tron resigned on Sunday after the two women in their mid-30s said they had gotten the courage to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn arrest.

Tron, it seems, liked to give foot massages and sometimes more. It got to the point where some women would wear boots if they knew Monsieur Masseur was coming to a meeting.

“Yes, my client is a reflexologist,” riposted Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb. “He’s never hidden it. He has given conferences at the Lion’s Club. It’s a healing treatment.”

In Le Journal du Dimanche, Valérie Toranian, the editor of Elle, wrote about the puncturing of France’s “Latin culture of seduction”: “We laugh about our Italian neighbors, but the stone today is in our garden.” (She probably didn’t want to use a shoe-on-the-other-foot metaphor given the foot fetishist on the loose.)

On Tuesday, Libération presented interviews with a parade of women who poured out long-stifled grievances about their paternalistic culture: How they feel they must wear pants to work to fend off leering; how they’re tired of men tu-ing instead of vous-ing and making comments like “O.K., but just because you have pretty eyes”; how they’re fed up with married pols who come to Paris three days a week and sleep with their assistants; how, as Aurélie Filipetti, a socialist representative, complained, male pols and journalists squat on 80 percent of the political space.

Filipetti remembers hearing a male representative say during a ceremony, in front of three female representatives, “Hunting is like women. You always regret the shots you didn’t take.”

Corinne Lepage, a former environment minister, talked about the de trop dirty jokes, recalling how once, when a female representative mentioned a rape, a male colleague called out: “With her face, it’s not going to happen to her.”

Nicole Guedj, a lawyer and former minister, said wistfully of male colleagues: “One thinks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t just look at me. I wish you would listen to me.’ ”

Roselyne Bachelot, a government minister, warned about lechers: “Something important has happened in these last few days. The lifting of a very real omertà, which had been reinforced by a legal arsenal that protected private life. I think that public men have understood that the respect of privacy now has some limits.”

Getting French men to change will still, she said, be pushing up “le rocher de Sisyphe.”

On France 2, Monday, May 16, I object strongly against the decision of Judge Melissa Jackson to detain Dominique Strauss-Kahn . I affirm that this decision shows the partisan nature of the procedure and unilateral dependent against him. I watch because it is contrary to American tradition: the bail is normally granted except homicide. In other words, according to an old French formula, unless killed. Is it sacrilege to be indignant against a measure that tramples upon the constant practice?

Then immediately snaps against me a mini-trial for witchcraft. We purposely isolated the words "dead man" to infer that that day would have trivialized the crime of rape. Hocus-pocus strange then that my topic is the only procedure for detention, it is as if I had decided on the merits of the case that I do not know.

Law professor that I was fairly beaten in France and elsewhere, against arbitrary police custody or imprisonment for not reporting illegal abuse of power committed by an American court against a French citizen . From my comments disfigured, I was suspected of complicity with regard to sex crimes that I have always vigorously opposed. How can you lend me a thought too vulgar, too stupid, too low and too manifestly contrary to my beliefs forever.

Long-time feminist activist, I fought hard against all forms of sexism and machismo. My fight for the rights, including women's rights, is known to many. It is constitutive of my civic since my youth.

Without going back to my participation in very old Planned Parenthood or my support for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (abortion), I remind of more recent developments: first mayor of a town in France (Blois) to establish strict equality rights -woman in a city council even before the reform Jospin, I am the originator of a text financially penalizing those political parties which do not ensure equal access of women to elected office. I fight simultaneously for the criminalization of rape.

Mock trial

Minister of Education, I adopt radical new measures for the rights of girls. Author of a book, Tomorrow's Women (Grasset), I participate, at the request of UN Secretary General, to preparation of the Beijing conference on women's rights in 1995. As such, I personally disagree and sometimes a local presence to violence against women in many countries.

From all this, I naturally does no glory. These actions are to me obvious. I am in full solidarity associations, personalities, women who engage forcefully and show a constant vigilance, even if I, temporarily and unjustly, be the subject of controversy.

Construction sites to open is no shortage: the persistent and appalling social and economic inequalities between men and women, exploitation, abuse and illiteracy of millions of women worldwide.

Nothing will distract me, not even the mock trial, from my fierce and relentless action to protect and defend the rights of human beings and especially women's rights? This is the very meaning of my life.

The poor are reminded every day of their limitations . I still think it is not wrong to send a powerful rich man to gaol if he is guilty . That people resent the rich for whatever reason is immaterial IF it does not effect the trial result .

The maid may want justice and not money. She may want him to go to prison. And, so far, she has been helping the prosecution to try to send him to prison.

So if most the evidence that Hawk asked for above (physical injury and signs of resistance, history of abusive sexual behavior, no evidence of "victimhood" by the alleged victim, etc.) is brought out in court and DSK is found guilty it means nothing unless he admits to it? By that standard our prisons are full of innocents.

Rubin Carter was falsely tried
The crime was murder 'one' guess who testified
Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers they all went along for the ride
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool's hand ?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.

She is certainly going to have some problems collecting on a civil suit against DSK, she should have better odds with her suit against her employer.

Definitely...and throw away the key .

Are you in the prison building business Io?

Are you saying that everybody in jail is guilty? A guilty verdict does not necessarily mean the guilt is proved. That's all I'm saying. The authorities offered Mike Tyson a year's remission to admit his guilt. He refused and served the year. I don't believe he was guilty of rape beyond a doubt. Dreyfus was innocent. Jesus was innocent.

It's a witch-hunt. And for the worst possible reasons. Money. And if the cleaning woman just wants "justice" (revenge), which I don't believe, then she is no Christian.

Impulsive, hysterical, voyeuristic, thrumming indignation at the impurity of men is in the dock here.

Those tabloid front pages ff so kindly brought to our attention were produced by cynics seeking to expose the nature of the public mental state to view. ...So newspapers are on trial as well. A not guilty verdict would be disastrous for them. As it would for many others.

All the hysterical speculation is not directed at men here, it is coming from them.

Picking out every once in the blue moon a super rich person and scarifying him or her to the mob to made them feel better instead seems kind of sad and pointless.

IF a person is guilty they shouldnt expect to get away with it just because they are rich and powerful .

Are you in the prison building business Io?

The USA already locks up more of their population than most countries.....

Interesting: one of the major critics of the states treatment of DSK now feels the need to trot out his feminist bona fides