[/caption]Michael Cosgrove - The pre-trial character assassination of the Sofitel maid who alleges she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn mirrors that of a French woman who is set to file charges of attempted rape against him. Both women may well have almost no chance of being heard.
France woke up today to the news that prosecutors could agree in the near future to drop all the charges against the former IMF leader, thus paving the way for a possible return to France where will be free to resume his political activities if he so desires.
The charges, filed by a Guinean hotel maid who alleged that Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) sexually assaulted her at the Midtown Sofitel hotel in New York, have been in trouble since it was revealed that the prosecution had doubts about her testimony and had discovered that she had lied about her past to immigration officials in order to enter the United States.
In a related development, French journalist Tristane Banon - who is 31 and the godchild of DSK’s second wife – announced yesterday that she is to file charges of attempted rape against him in a French court today. She alleges that he pulled open her bra and tried to undo her jeans during a 2002 meeting he had arranged with her in a Paris apartment in order for her to interview him. She claims that she had to literally fight with him on the floor before managing to escape.
Banon did not press charges at the time largely due to the advice of her mother, who told her that doing so may cause irreparable damage to her career prospects, although she subsequently repeated her accusations and named DSK on a TV show. DSK’s reaction to yesterday’s news was to immediately file defamation charges against her.
If prosecutors decide that the Sofitel maid’s testimony is too flawed to stand up in court and that she has lied about her past life, DSK will be free to go back to France and set about exploiting whatever his lawyers and private investigators can dig up on Banon in order to destroy her credibility and have the French charges overturned as well. Indeed, there are already rich pickings at his disposal and she is in danger of being ripped apart by the defense team.
Banon gave an exclusive interview to French daily L’Express yesterday in which she admitted that she didn't have a particularly happy upbringing – she doesn’t know her father and says she was brought up by a nanny who would hit her - and that that is one of the reasons that she has led what she herself calls a somewhat erratic life and love life.
It already seems obvious that Tristane Banon is currently in a very fragile state of mind and that she may well prove to be easy prey for those who will be only to willing to apply massive pressure on her and cast her character in a bad light by using testimony from people she has met in her apparently turbulent past.
Also, it is only to be expected that a poor Guinean woman like the Sofitel maid would be tempted to lie – or at least to put the more positive aspects of her character and motivations to the fore at the expense of less flattering aspects - to gain entry to a country in which she could try to build a future for herself and her daughter.
A large section of public opinion is already negative towards the Sofitel maid and Banon is being flayed alive in the French press, where even women are to be found in large numbers denouncing her as ‘being in it for the money’ or deranged or that she is being manipulated by DSK’s political enemies.
But the worst aspect of this situation is that both may well never get to explain their case to a court and, even if one or both of them gets to court, they will be pitilessly hounded by press, public and lawyers alike. They have almost no chance of persuading a court to answer the essential – the only real – question, which is “were they sexually assaulted or not?”
The sad fact is that the truth may never be known, and that victims of sexual assault the world over will know from now on that filing charges will expose them to almost unbearable pressure and they will endure the pain of seeing details of their private lives on public display, particularly if they are accusing a well-known and wealthy personality. This was already the case before, but these two women’s predicaments show that things may get even harder for them in the future.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’ contains the following lines;
We make her paint her face and dance
If she won't be a slave, we say that she don't love us
If she's real, we say she's trying to be a man
While putting her down, we pretend that she's above us
We insult her every day on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she's young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb
Those words were written at the beginning of the 1970’s. And they are still true today...
