“French citizens may not mind their leaders acting out their Louis XIV fantasies with impunity, but Manhattan isn’t Paris. DSK got neither more nor less than he deserved – something for which he can blame, and thank, Cy Vance and America’s justice system.” ‘The Judgment on DSK’, The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2011
When a fat, squat, ugly, 62-year-old, Jewish man claims that, within a maximum period of nine minutes from first encounter to affair’s end, he charmed and seduced a 32 year-old Muslim single- mother into stripping him of his clothing and fellating him to a sexual climax, the mind simply boggles with dis-belief. Anyone, anywhere in any part of the world, who believes that lie is either a simpleton, or is motivated by goals other than a search for the truth.
Yet, the decision by Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, to ask a New York judge to dismiss all charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the judge’s decision so to do were entirely correct in a country where the rule of law applies. In the DSK case, Anglo-Saxon law has worked exactly as it should, at every stage from the initial accusation to the ultimate outcome.
Ms. Nafissatou Diallo evidently had sufficient confidence in the integrity of the New York legal system to file a complaint with the NYPD following the alleged sexual assault and use of force upon her helpless body, by a white male, while she was attempting to clean his $3,000 a night hotel suite.
The NYPD, alerted to the fact that DSK was attempting to flee the country for France – where he would have had the audacity to make a run for the Presidency – immediately following the alleged crime, had every right to drag him from the flight and to take him into Riker’s Island custody in handcuffs.
With DNA evidence that DSK’s semen was splattered all over the suite and all over the maid, the District Attorney had no option but to bring DSK before a Grand Jury.
Given the evidence, the Grand Jury had no option but to indict DSK on seven charges, two of which involved sexual assault.
Given the indictment and the risk of flight, the New York District Attorney acted generously in placing DSK under house arrest until his case could be fully investigated.
Given the lies about her sexual past, perpetrated under oath, by the hotel maid, and given inconsistencies in her account of the sexual assault in the Sofitel Hotel, the District Attorney had no option but to ask for the charges against DSK to be dismissed.
In the light of this request, and in the absence of eyewitness evidence of the nature of the sexual encounter between DSK and Ms Diallo, the judge had no option but to dismiss all charges.
This does not at all imply that DSK is anything but guilty as charged. His own past history of abuse of women, of forcing women into sexual encounters, of admitting publicly to three separate sexual encounters with unknown women during a two day private visit to New York City, constitute powerful evidence that DSK is an aging, unattractive Lothario, hunting down vulnerable women wherever he can lay his hands upon them, and relying upon power and the wealth of a politically-ambitious millionairess wife, to safeguard him from the legal consequences of his deviance.
The rule of law, however, requires that crimes must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt, a high bar, deliberately designed to avoid convicting the innocent, that inevitably allows some guilty to go unpunished. If Type one errors are low, then Type Two errors must be correspondingly high. DSK is the beneficiary, in this instance, of a Type Two error.
How the citizens of France respond to this situation will signal the character of the people. Expectations cannot be high. History demonstrates the poor quality of French character and French culture. The French Revolution was allowed to collapse into the Terror and into the injudicious reliance on Madame Guillotine. World War II, demonstrated the overt anti-Semitism of the Vichy government led by the corrupt Marshall Petain, who collaborated with a German monster to send many thousands of French Jews to the gas chambers. The delight of a French majority in collapsing the Fourth Republic into the dictatorship of Charles de Gaulle demonstrated the fragile nature of their democratic instincts.
If DSK runs for the Presidency of France, he may well win. For even among female voters there appears to be a high degree of tolerance for male abuse of women, when the males in question are rich and powerful and pay lip-service to the ideology of progressive socialism.
If such is the nature of the French majority, then DSK will be a strong contender for the Presidency of France. Americans, for the most part, will respect but not condone a DSK Presidency.
If Strauss-Kahn is elected into the Elysee Palace, he would be wise to confine himself to his regular visits to his Swingers’ Club haunts in Paris. District Attorney Cyrus Vance, and the NYPD will be on full alert, should DSK should ever choose to visit New York again, his presidency nothwithstanding.
That is the nature of the Anglo-Saxon rule of law properly applied.
