What could really sink DSK is if that 31 year old who claimed DSK tried to rape her comes to testify. Since she is completely out of the closet with the story (and has been for several years now) it is not out of the question that she and maybe her mother would come to testify. I wonder if their testimony to the character of DSK would be admissible.
Sorry but it hardly likely under our legal system that an unproven claim rape attempt that surface ten years after it was supposed to had occur would be allow.
In criminal trials, the defendant may always introduce opinion evidence or reputation evidence to prove that he or she did not commit the crime of which he or she is accused. However, if a criminal defendant does introduce such evidence, the prosecution may then counter this with evidence of the defendant's bad character. This is called 'opening the door'. The defendant cannot introduce evidence of specific good acts to show that he or she did not commit a bad act.
When someone other than the defendant testifies as to the defendant's good character, the prosecution may ask if the witness was aware of specific bad acts committed by the defendant. This is permissible because the question is not asked to prove the defendant's character, but simply to impeach the credibility of the witness. However, one cannot use extrinsic evidence to prove that the witness is wrong about what they testify to, they must be taken at their word.
Another exception arises in criminal trials where the defendant introduces evidence of the character of the alleged crime victim, in order to show that the defendant acted in self defense. For example, if the defendant is on trial for battery of the victim, the defendant can introduce evidence that the victim has a reputation for violence, or that a witness has the opinion that the victim is a violent person, in order to show that the defendant actually acted in self defense. The prosecution may counter this by introducing similar evidence of the victim's peaceful nature, or by introducing similar evidence of the defendant's violent nature.
If I read this correctly, any attempt by DSK's team to attack the alleged victim or show DSK as a saint "opens the door".
This column is a heartfelt cry: Stop the fire! The DSK case and what it carries is killing political journalism. Some describe it as saving the lifting of the taboo sex and politics " , in reality it is murder. Not only the political journalist must defend himself against serious charges, but he no longer knows how to do his job. He became the casualty of this affair. So far the rule was clear: there was the public life and recounted that the privacy that preserved. But the dam was tripped: the politician became stalker, predator, if not more, and, by extension, the political journalist is suspected of passive complicity. "Oh, you know? It happens like that in policies? " And he must defend himself by recalling a few basic principles: respect for privacy, denial of the rumor and slander, presumption of innocence, facts, nothing but the facts, etc..
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I hear the argument of those who argue for the general unpacking, cleaning kind of Augean stables, and stop the macho revenge for women. But now things are going, frankly, better make her apron!
J'entends l'argument de ceux qui plaident pour le grand déballage, genre nettoyage des écuries d'Augias, halte aux machos et revanche pour les femmes. Mais au train où vont les choses, franchement, mieux vaut rendre son tablier !
I found it here. Interesting reasoning saying the "The presumption of innocence does not exist in the United States." Very political for someone who had to fight off a rapist.
Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was accused of sexual crimes in New York, said he was confident his client's chances of winning the case and predicted that "it will be discharged" in a portrait done for the chain French M6.
What about twenty minutes entitled "Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for celebrities, star of lawyers" to be broadcast Sunday on the show "66 Minutes" at 17:15 in France (1515 GMT).
"I do not want to go so far into the details of this case but I'm confident, I do not think at all that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty of the allegations against him, and I can predict that it will be relaxed, "he concludes.
The former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), charged with sexual assault and attempted rape by a maid of the Sofitel hotel, scheduled to appear Monday and say whether he pleads guilty or not guilty.
I Brafman, who refused interviews since the outbreak of the DSK case, accepted it "because she clung more to do a portrait of him that make him speak of the latter case," told AFP Etienne Truchot, one of two reporters who met him.
In the subject, you can see people who knew Mr. Brafman about his working methods, influenced by his religious upbringing and his spirit of contradiction.
And Les Levine, a private investigator who worked with him for many years - but not this time - he says how his job is to "dumpster diving" to allow counsel to show jurors that the main witness - in this case the alleged victim - "unreliable".
Ben Brafman, who has 62 years, "is especially good when it comes to harassing the prosecutor," remembers Walter Mack, a former prosecutor who had to face off in the '80s, when the trial against the mafia and Colombo Gambino, which the lawyer has built its reputation.
"Every morning for half an hour at the hearing he told me that I had trouble doing my job, I was destabilizing," said Walter Mack.
In 2001, when the acquittal of rapper Puff Daddy - today-p.diddy - for allegedly opened fire in front of more than 100 witnesses may be heard in archive footage Benjamin Brafman said "I I thank God. "
"My goal is to repeat the facts," the lawyer said simply, recalling that it is sufficient that one juror had a doubt and the accused out of court free.
Ben Brafman also has a keen eye. In another case, the release of a former king of the night, Peter Gatien, accused of complicity in drug trafficking for leaving dealers distribute ecstasy in nightclubs, Mr. Brafman was the only one to see that two witnesses, never to be supposed, appeared wearing the same suit.
Interviewed in Toronto, Peter Gatien remembers. "When have you seen for the last time?" He asked the second witness. "There are very long," replied the latter. "Why is it when you wear the costume he had yesterday? "Brafman then retorted, before turning to the jury and say," let you the keys to your house to a liar? "He won, and I was free," says Peter Gatien.
"As soon as he unearths a lie, he rushes into the breach," recalls James Cohen, a law professor at Fordham University and an expert on cons-examination. "He speaks little of his client, he is primarily attacking the witnesses," he says.
"I've seen him cook the other side, I can imagine the questions he could ask the maid," said the lawyer.
Benjamin Brafman had already informed the Israeli daily Haaretz at the beginning of the case he was confident in the outcome of any trial to be held if the former IMF chief pleads not guilty in court of Monday.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn will never be President of the Republic but his political and social legacy is secure. He has shaken France more profoundly from his prison cell and gilded judicial exile in New York than he could possibly have achieved from within the Élysée Palace.
Three weeks after DSK's arrest, France is in culture-shock. The French are re-examining, painfully, two of their fondest beliefs about themselves. Fond belief number one: the French media and legal system have a healthier approach to the private lives of public figures than the prurient and puritanical "Anglo-Saxons". Fond belief number two: French men and women have much saner, and more relaxed, sexual relations than the uptight Anglo-Saxons, the frigid Germans or the silly Italians. The "affaire DSK" has left both fond beliefs in tatters.
Has the country's legally enforced policy of kiss and no tell concealed bad, even criminal, sexual behaviour by public figures? Quite possibly. But the pendulum has now lurched in the opposite direction. From failing to discuss what was widely known in the Paris media-political village (Strauss-Kahn's often aggressive and predatory behaviour towards women), France is now being confronted with tittle-tattle masquerading as truth.
A respected philosopher, and former education minister, Luc Ferry, implied on television this week that he had "evidence" that a former minister had been arrested during a paedophile orgy with small boys in Morocco. The scandal had, he said, been hushed up by the then French government. Which minister? Which French government? Mr Ferry did not say but he implied, self-importantly, that he had been given firsthand information about it by a "prime minister".
The French-language internet, including the websites of respectable news organisations, joyously guessed at the possible identity of the allegedly paedophile minister. All print editions, quite rightly, have refused to speculate and have attacked Mr Ferry. A preliminary criminal investigation was ordered by the French state prosecution service into a possible concealed crime. Mr Ferry was interviewed about what he knows by French police yesterday.
All the evidence suggests that Mr Ferry, a successful philosopher and failed politician, knows very little. He was repeating an often-repeated rumour, which had been investigated in the 1990s by the French media, in France and Morocco, and had proved to be groundless. He was just trying to make a point on a TV discussion programme or, as several French newspapers suggested, he was conducting a Cartesian experiment: "I am being talked about therefore I am."
And so to Fond Belief number two: "French men and women are more relaxed about sex, and about each other, than other nations (Brazil possibly excepted)." The "affaire DSK" has, it seems, broken a vow of silence among French women. Women's support groups report an increase of up to 600 per cent in calls from women who say that they have been sexually harassed or blackmailed at work.
Many of the incidents happened many years ago. The women were not necessarily seeking revenge or legal action. They just wanted to talk, for the first time, about what had happened to them. Women's groups say that the calls suggest that many – not all – French men in positions of authority regard female employees as a resource to be bullied, or blackmailed, or bribed into sexual submission.
Significantly, it was not Mr Strauss-Kahn's arrest on charges of attempted rape which dislodged this avalanche of female anger. It was the dismissive attitude of some male French politicians and political commentators to DSK's alleged crime. Many of the women said that they were moved to come forward when a Socialist friend of DSK talked of him as a "libertine" with an appetite for "pleasures of the flesh" or when a political journalist, and friend of Strauss-Kahn, spoke dismissively of the "troussage" (casual sexual abuse) of a maid. What angered them, they said, was not the allegations against DSK but what the comments had revealed about the arrogance and sense of impunity of French men.
As a representative of the frigid, uptight, prurient, puritanical rest-of-the-world, I should probably rejoice in the fact that the myth of the relaxed French attitude to sex has been skewered.
Some French men have undoubtedly exploited this myth to exploit French women. Sexual harassment has been more tolerated in France because the French like to believe that they take a relaxed view of sex. Similarly, the French media failed to distinguish between reporting on "private lives" and reporting on DSK's often offensive or aggressive attitude towards women.
And yet, my 14 years of observing the French, suggests to me that the myth of relaxed French sexuality is not entirely a myth. Many French people, both male and female, have a frank attitude to sex which is healthier than our sniggering obsessiveness.
There was support for this point of view from an unexpected quarter this week. French women's rights activists have long claimed that they take a more balanced and tolerant approach to male-female relations than the "politically correct" and "anti-male" approach of "Anglo-Saxon" feminists. In blogs and newspaper articles, American feminists are now accusing their "weak" French sisters of spawning male monsters by tolerating macho attitudes. In an article in Le Monde this week, the French sociologist, Irène Théry, defended féminisme à la Française. It was possible, she said, to demand equality for women while appreciating the "pleasures of consensual seduction and the delicious surprise of stolen kisses".
I would make a similar argument about French privacy laws. Public figures should be exposed if they behave badly. That does not mean that we always have a right to pry into the consensual love lives of public figures. Culture shock can be good, or bad. When the DSK affair subsides, it would be a pity if France learns the wrong lessons.
In other words this is an objection to the call to emasculate men.
Which provides an opportunity to remember that "Votes for women, purity for men
Get real! It is a lond established scientific fact that men are very visually oriented. If women are going to walk around provoking lust in lust in men to satisfy their femine egos then expect some unwanted attention. Use some common sense and quit trying to have complete control men. There is a proper place for suggestive attire and it's nopt in public. Seeing womens nipples and labia on display is a deliberate attempt to humiliate and dominate men. A power trip, period.
6/4/2011 11:49:14 PM PDT
Similarly, the French media failed to distinguish between reporting on "private lives" and reporting on DSK's often offensive or aggressive attitude towards women.
Thierry Ardisson, the television presenter who hosted the 2007 programme in which Miss Banon revealed the alleged attack by Mr Strauss-Kahn (the name was bleeped out in the broadcast) - said afterwards he knew of at least a dozen other women who had been "jumped on" by the politician. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/8528549/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-when-sex-and-money-collide-the-IMF-makes-its-own-rules.html
Wednesday, May. 18, 2011
Smoke and Fire: Why France Was Silent About Strauss-Kahn's Womanizing
By Bruce Crumley / Paris
When news of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke in France, Emmanuel Pierrat remembered the young woman who came seeking legal advice about half a decade ago. She said she had had an encounter with Strauss-Kahn and, says the lawyer Pierrat, "wanted to know whether I thought what I heard would form the basis for a solid legal case against him." Pierrat says the news out of New York City last weekend was "something I had heard before" because of what the young woman several years ago had described as "the modus operandi of the attacker, [whom] she said was Strauss-Kahn." Says Pierrat: [It] "was almost identical to the details [described by] the woman [who said she was] attacked Sunday in New York."
On Monday, Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a onetime likely presidential candidate in France, was arraigned in New York City on charges of sexual assault and attempted rape, including preventing a hotel worker at a Manhattan Sofitel from leaving his expensive quarters, groping her and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. He has pleaded not guilty; his legal team is reportedly planning to argue that the sex was consensual.
Recalling his experience with the client to TIME, Pierrat says he told the young woman that he believed she had a case. "There were sufficient elements for a legal complaint to be filed and for a judicial investigation into them to be granted," he says. But in the end, the woman chose not to go ahead. Pierrat explains that it was "because she knew there'd be a lot of public and media attention, knew she'd come under pressure, be cast as a liar, a woman who was looking for trouble, get tagged as the villain who took down Dominique Strauss-Kahn — or tried to. She knew there'd be a high price to pay for trying to do the right thing and knew she would probably be tarred for it."
"In addition to my client," says Pierrat, "I also have a personal friend who came to me and described an unwanted, forceful sexual advance by Strauss-Kahn that she was forced to literally fight off. They're all essentially the same account, the same kind of behavior, with only the places changed."
Even the well connected had qualms about confronting Strauss-Kahn. A regional Socialist Party official stepped up on Monday to say that her daughter had come under sexual attack during a 2002 interview with Strauss-Kahn. The official, Anne Mansouret, repeated the allegations made by her daughter Tristane Banon during a 2007 TV program about how a well-known politician [Strauss-Kahn's name was bleeped out] tried to overpower her with a sexual embrace. What took so long for Mansouret to back up her daughter and name Strauss-Kahn? She told French TV that she had dissuaded her daughter from filing charges because Strauss-Kahn was en route to greatness — and derailing the ascent of a fellow Socialist Party official would be bad form. She also said that because Strauss-Kahn's second wife was Banon's godmother, blowing the whistle on the alleged attacker would create rifts within Mansouret's circle of family, friends and intimates.
A Paris attorney who specializes in defending victims of sexual violence, who didn't want to be named, says he has "an entire pile of complaints" from women who say they were attacked by Strauss-Kahn. Like Pierrat, he says last weekend's news evoked déjà vu. And like Pierrat, he says he has a consistency of accusations against Strauss-Kahn. "It's all so similar," he says. "The lock thrown on the door, the pulled or ripped undergarments, the physical force that turned violent as resistance mounted, all of it. And frankly, this isn't at all incompatible with the skirt-chaser stories and reputation of an incorrigible ladies' man. [Strauss-Kahn's] defenders tend to say his conquests are seduction, and that while perhaps condemnable as adultery, they don't constitute rape. But there's another school of thought — favored by a lot of clinical specialists — who say someone that obsessed with sexual encounters is dysfunctional, an addict. They're dependent on them, and when denied or otherwise frustrated, they snap and try to take it anyway. They are sick, and when their sickness takes full control, they lose all logic, lose rationality, and all reason and consequence vanishes in the impulse and violence of the act."
No sexual-assault charges, however, were ever filed in France against Strauss-Kahn, who faces what may be a long legal procedure before a U.S. court can determine whether he is guilty or innocent of the New York City allegations. Still, his past behavior appears to indicate that he has troublesome issues with women who strike his fancy. In 2008, after Strauss-Kahn was reprimanded for his relationship with an IMF subordinate, the economist Piroska Nagy, for which he apologized, a few more people in France were willing to talk openly of his reputation — but only in a bantering, almost jokey way. Socialist parliamentarian Aurelie Filipetti admitted to a newspaper to having suffered a "very heavy-handed flirt" by Strauss-Kahn — one so unpleasant and insistent that "I made sure I was not in a closed room with him" ever again. On a radio show, one French actress asked out loud, "Who hasn't been cornered by Dominique Strauss-Kahn?"...
Then there is the French gender double standard — and the cult of what the French call the seducteur, the charmer, the operator. "It's not just that the word of a woman doesn't necessarily have the same weight as that of a man in many situations," says Rokhaya Diallo, president of Les Indivisibles, an association that promotes diversity in France. "It's that there's still this enduring attitude that seduction, conquests, affairs and flings by men is somehow O.K., even sort of admirable, while women who complain of sexual aggression are either making it up, or just having buyer's regret. Clear sexual violence is taken seriously and punished, but this wider tolerance of male conquest turns the other aspects of aggression gray in the minds of many people. Which I suppose is one reason people don't seem surprised to learn of Strauss-Kahn being caught in a sex scandal. His reputation led people to assume he'd be caught up in one sooner or later. The real debate is whether it involved sexual violence or not."
Strauss-Kahn may have been abetted by the fact that most of his so-called conquests involved ideological fellow travelers — as was reflected by the Banon case. Says the French lawyer who asked not to be named: "My clients and other women I've been contacted by with reports of sexual aggression by Strauss-Kahn were all either Socialist Party members, supporters, or involved in wider leftist political activity that eventually brought them into contact with Strauss-Kahn. He has said he loves women, but it seems more accurate to say he loves Socialist women. I suppose he viewed that milieu as providing his supply of new women, and as one where women who caught his eye would either be compliant, or keep quiet about having to fight off his advances. Either way, there are a lot more women — and men — in Socialists circles who know about his activity than have ever said so."
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2072209,00.html
If you have been following the argument you know that a bunch of us at A2K believe that the rape scare and the overhaul of the sex laws is primarily a political action.....it is a program to empower women at the expense of men, it is not based upon any realistic need or greater good justification but is rather a ballsy power grab for the sake of the desire of the American feminists to control men.
It wasn't just his aggressive attitude, it was also apparently his aggressive behaviors that they either failed to report or didn't bother to investigate.
who say someone that obsessed with sexual encounters is dysfunctional, an addict. They're dependent on them, and when denied or otherwise frustrated, they snap and try to take it anyway. They are sick, and when their sickness takes full control, they lose all logic, lose rationality, and all reason and consequence vanishes in the impulse and violence of the act."
Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet
I could accuse me of such things that it were better my
mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do,
crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's
your father?
I've maintained that this case doesn't fit your argument. What is accused is a classic attempted rape case, the type that just about everyone thinks is wrong.
It is just your old fashioned throw the woman down and force her type of case
It turns it from "reasonable belief in consent" to "anything goes" including violence.
All I have heard about is damage to DSK's back which it is claimed Ophelia admits to causing, by violence.
a half hour later she was still so hysterical that she could not speak straight.
Quote:Really? Tristane appears not to feel strongly enough that what was alleged was wrong to do her part to right it, either that or so does not believe the allegation. This case is exactly the kind of event that I dont think should be in the criminal system AT ALL, for we very clearly have in part a confusion on consent, in this case almost certainly caused by cultural differences.I've maintained that this case doesn't fit your argument. What is accused is a classic attempted rape case, the type that just about everyone thinks is wrong.
Quote:I dont believe that DSK could physically do that, nor that he would. I dont know if the source of the problem is Ophelia's story telling or the states practice of exaggeration when trying to hammer an alleged sexual evildoer.It is just your old fashioned throw the woman down and force her type of case
Quote:Have we any evidence of violence on the part of DSK? All I have heard about is damage to DSK's back which it is claimed Ophelia admits to causing, by violence.It turns it from "reasonable belief in consent" to "anything goes" including violence.
I hadn't heard that hawk. She hadn't been caning his bottom surely?
