Like It or Not, DSK Reveals a Lot About Ourselves

‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’

There has been no shortage of supposedly progressive bloggers who were more than ready to assume Dominique Strauss-Khan guilty of sexually assaulting a New York hotel chambermaid and who became infuriated when reports came out that the case against DSK was crumbling - because of the purported victim herself.   Some even went so far as to indignantly claim that it was all because the woman wasn't perfectly chaste.   The poor getting hammered by the privileged rich and powerful again.   Nice narrative and oh so convenient but a smear job based on deliberately twisted facts.

When you're out well on the left or out well on the right there seems to be an inability to accept the presumption of innocence for someone you perceive to be on the other side.   I suppose it's that Jacobin reflex coming into play.   Forget the fact that fundamental rights, such as the right to be presumed innocent until convicted, instantly turn into mere privileges when they're extended selectively.

But to say this woman was being persecuted because of her past sexual history is to stand reality on its head, to jettison the real facts of the case as not fitting the convenient narrative.

‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’

 

Those lines, spoken  by the supposed victim to her boyfriend in an immigration jail in Arizona the following day, sent alarm bells ringing for investigators.   This guy has a lot of money.  I know what I'm doing.  Would you prosecute a case knowing that was going to be laid before the judge and jury?

It was another ground-shifting revelation in a continuing series of troubling statements, fabrications and associations that unraveled the case and upended prosecutors’ view of the woman. Once, in the hours after she said she was attacked on May 14, she’d been a “very pious, devout Muslim woman, shattered by this experience,” the official said — a seemingly ideal witness.


Little by little, her credibility as a witness crumbled — she had lied about her immigration, about being gang raped in Guinea, about her experiences in her homeland and about her finances, according to two law enforcement officials. She had been linked to people suspected of crimes. She changed her account of what she did immediately after the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn. Sit-downs with prosecutors became tense, even angry. Initially composed, she later collapsed in tears and got down on the floor during questioning. She became unavailable to investigators from the district attorney’s office for days at a time.

There's no doubt that DSK had been the head of the big, bad International Monetary Fund and that this can easily be spun into a powerful abuser versus powerless victim soap opera but that is to utterly torture truth and to cast away all notions of principle and fairness.  What's progressive about that?