For all we know, he paid her for the blowjob. 
Which is funny, because you rehash the very same BS in this very same post:
You clearly have a comprehension problem. You said the following in response to my first comment:
What makes you think I am surprised he “manages” to shag? The point is that he is a married, public official who admittedly slept with his maid under circumstances that could make him subject to blackmail, extortion, or accusations of sexual assault. He put himself in a position where he could be exploited, and where the power and responsibility he’d been given could be utilized improperly. Those actions alone are what have largely ruined his reputation here in the states. Maybe that kind of conduct is okay in France, but it’s not okay here, or in many other parts of the world. Including, it would seem, China, Germany, England, and Austria- all countries whose leaders either advocated he step down, or did so implicitly by backing another candidate for the job prior to his resignation. So you can call us puritanical all you’d like, I think it’s pretty clear you are in the minority on that view wrt this situation.
Regardless, our views on things would have no impact on a French election if he is acquitted, and if French society is as permissive as you think it is. You might want to consider that perhaps French people see this as as problematic as many in the states do.
Implying that a rape charge is something he ‘had coming’ because of his promiscuity is not far from telling a rape victim she ‘had it coming’ for being promiscuous or dressing like a slut.
He was told (and was smart enough to realize that by himself) that the head of the IMF can not stand being arrested and sued for rape, whether the accusations are backed or not. So he resigned (would that constitute an acknowledgement he commited the crime, now?).
Yeah, right, the leading challenger to next election is arrested for rape, pilloryed for weeks on, and then, if he is released, “everything is back to normal”… Puritanism and hypocrisy make for such amiable companions.
We’re not 4 years old, we dont take down our leaders because they shag outside of marriage. It isnt a crime to do so, but the way you phrase it, it apparently is in your mind. And even if he wasnt guilty of rape, he was guilty of the heinous crime of “extra-marital sex”. Wow.
We shouldnt give a toss about what are the States’ opinion on his morality. The only thing that could have mattered was whether he is guilty of rape or not. For the rest, can it. You’re just proving my point that American Puritanism has taken a stance in our future elections.
P.S:btw, how do you blackmail someone whose sex life is well known to his wife, and not cared about by his voters?
P.S.2: oh yeah, how dare I speak as “the minority” when the majority has gone into mob rule mode.
In America ? Perhaps.
In France ? Nobody gives a flying fuck. I’m serious. Mitterrand had a daughter with his mistress, and was quite open about it. They even came to his funeral - all three women (wife, mistress, bastard daughter) grieved together. Quite the Kodak moment. Chirac, well, he was known for jumping onto every bit of trim came his way. And of course there’s Sarkozy, his getting tossed out by his wife and his new trophy wife. And that’s just the Presidents.
Nobody gives a shit. Why should we, as long as it’s legal ? And since no shits are given, how would you propose to blackmail him, exactly ?
I am not so sure that such is the case. The French media tends to look the other way so it was not in their face, but I am not so sure that they do not care. He was considered an attractive candidate because he was thought to have some gravitas; knowing that now he is more like a Berlusconi - at best - is something that the voters may care about.
He wasn’t open at all about it. So much so that he had the equivalent of the US Secret Service illegally spy upon a variety of people, in particular a journalist and a writer to protect this secret, which later led to prosecutions (cf “affaire des ecoutes telephoniques de l’Elysee”).
His double life was known by politicians and journalists but never disclosed to the general public because disclosing the private life of politicians, at least at this time, wasn’t consider acceptable.
We only learned that he was actually living with a woman other than his wife, and had a teenage daughter with her, when he gave the “green light” to a major publication to disclose the existence of this daughter. And this happened because he was at the end of his second term and also of his natural life, being in the last phases of cancer, probably because he wanted to publicly acknowledge her existence before his death.
It is true however that despite being very surprised, the public didn’t react negatively, and was in general moved by that cemetery scene you’re referring to.
Where did I imply he, “had it coming”. I said putting yourself in the position he put himself in opens one up to those accusations and other things. This is just reality. Your interpretation is complete bullshit especially because it is far from clear that he is a victim at all. Doubly so, since this is the SECOND time he has been publicly accused of sexual assault.
Ask yourself why this is the case, then you will recognize why people of his stature should not put themselves in positions like this.
I never said it did. In fact, I have explicitly reserved judgment. All I have said is that he does not deserve the assumption of innocence given his past.
So you are admitting that the French people can’t get over it, and that perhaps it is a bigger deal than you made it seem? Assuming he is acquitted, there is nothing preventing him from being elected to office other than people’s desire not to elect him for one reason or another. Yes, there would likely be a lingering stench, but there is nothing about the handling of this case that would mitigate that stench since the charges and trial will be public, and the accusation would have still be made.
Where did I say extramarital sex was a heinous crime? What I said was that people of his stature should generally not put themselves in positions like that because it may allow them to be corrupted. It’s not the sex, it’s usually the cover up, or the money and favors your partner can extract to keep the whole thing secret. Witness John Edwards, who allegedly funneled huge amounts of campaign money to his mistress to hide his affair. Or John Ensign, who allegedly did the same thing. You don’t want people doing things like that because they open themselves up to these sorts of things. I could not care less about who he sleeps with aside from the fact that his choices in that regard can affect his ability to exercise the power he’s given.
Then why are you bitching? Do you honestly expect us not to investigate, and try alleged criminals? If a Senator from the US went to France, and allegedly raped a girl, do you not think the French would try to prosecute the crime? I fully expect they would and, absent a perp walk, most of the other actions taken by law enforcement and the media here would likely be matched by their counterparts in France.
You tell him you want X amount of money, or certain favors, or you will accuse him of rape. Not saying the victim in this case did that, but many seem to be implying that she did. Do you honestly think this guy wouldn’t have paid her off if given the benefit of hindsight? If you acknowledge that he likely would have, then you understand why its not good to sleep with a woman you barely know, in a foreign country, under unusual circumstances.
See above. More importantly, a mistress is not some maid you just met. The context of the situation, and likely consequences are very different.
Why are we letting these scumbags, like the con-artist who first immigrated through asylum fraud and then falsely accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape, into the country? You’d think we would have a better screening process in place to weed out bad apples. Or is that racist?
Here’s what I will say. As an American I think the perp walk is showmanship and has no place in the criminal justice system. In truth it is not nearly as common as the news media would suggest, because 99.99% of defendants are not famous and thus no one cares.
In America lots of “man on the street” types always argue that the rich and the famous get off more leniently than everyone else. In general I would say that an upper class white male has a better chance of avoiding prison if charged with a crime. That is mostly because they will probably have better counsel than a poor person. However, for people who have true celebrity status from what I can see they get treated worse than the average man.
For example many people were/have been up in arms about Lindsay Lohan and earlier Paris Hilton in how they were “coddled” by the justice system. However if you actually look at the sequence of events, regular defendants are typically given more lenient treatment and just as many chances to fuck up on those sorts of charges.
What tends to happen with a famous defendant is you unfortunately have prosecutors who want to grandstand, because it can catapult the prosecutor to greater political fame and success.
Now, here is what does bother me about this thread. A few of the French posters are going on about how the French public is totally fine with their leaders having affairs and that Americans are puritans. I find it deeply troubling you think that is even relevant to this case. DSK was not arrested on the charge of adultery. He was arrested for forcible sexual assault, I sincerely hope that in France people don’t view rape as something that only a puritan country should care about.
Further, it is worth noting this happened in New York City–if you remember the famous former mayor of NYC, Rudy Giuliani, was essentially separated from his wife by the time of the 1997 elections and it was an “open secret” that Rudy had associations with other women (even though he and his wife remained married up until the year 2000.) So in NYC of all places I find it very difficult to support any claim that “American Puritanism” was the cause for DSK’s fall.
As for DSK’s arrest, by and large it looks like there was strong evidence supporting an arrest. In the American system you can be arrested and charged based on probable cause, and you can be detained for questioning if necessary on lesser grounds. In a rape case in which a woman reports a rape immediately after it occurred, has signs of physical trauma, and there isn’t anything immediately apparent to make you question her story in pretty much all fifty states the person she accused would be arrested immediately. DSK was special because France is essentially a place where, if you commit the most heinous crimes in the world here in the U.S. you can 100% escape punishment by just going home to France, so there was special circumstances that justified the extensive bail conditions.
As for comparisons to Mike NiFong, I do suspect the Manhattan DA will take heat for this (and has already), but a Mike NiFong he is not. There are many material differences. Firstly, all he ever really said early on was that the accuser was highly credible. Mind that the DA is a public servant who was/is prosecuting a case of great public interest. Criminal procedures are a matter of public record in the United States, and our trials must be conducted in public and that is one of the core parts of our civil liberties here. It is a protection against secret government trials in which anything could happen. As someone prosecuting a case against one of the world’s most powerful men, I don’t think it entirely inappropriate for him to explain to the public why the case is happening by briefly saying “there was a credible accuser who accused him of a violent crime and it was supported by physical evidence.”
Mike NiFong did far more grandstanding. Secondly, Mike NiFong committed the crime of prosecutorial misconduct by deliberately hiding exculpatory information from the defense. For that he was sentenced to 24 hours incarceration and has lost his license to practice law, and has essentially lost public standing to the point it will be very difficult for him to ever recover. Where the Manhattan DA is far different is that it was his investigators who discovered all the holes in the defendants case, and he released that information to the defense and went along with more lenient bail conditions the moment these things were discovered.
In the American court system, a good prosecutor is a vigorous advocate for their client, their client being the people and the state. That means if their client has a case, which we certainly did on the day DSK was arrested, it is the prosecutor’s responsibility to vigorously pursue it. However, part of having the state as your client also means you have a dual responsibility. Yes, you have the responsibility to vigorously pursue any case that is supported by strong evidence, but as an agent of the state you also have a responsibility to see the correct result from the trial which means no innocent man should be convicted. If a prosecutor finds anything that might make their case seem more questionable, or finds evidence of genuine innocence, they have a responsibility to convey that to the other side and if the evidence is strong enough to even dismiss the charges. That’s different from the defense attorney who has the sole responsibility of vigorously defending their client within the bounds of legal ethics, no matter if that client is factually guilty or innocent.
I feel that the Manhattan DA’s behavior in this case indicates he is one of the “good guys” and in fact is interested in not seeing an innocent man be convicted, and he has complied with legal ethics.
I also understand that the French may be shocked at the publicity that DSK has been forced to endure. In the United States, we have a strange position on freedom of speech. On the one hand, we have an extremely strong protection of the freedom of speech. We have had classified documents stolen and published over the legal objections of the President of the United States, we have had schematics for nuclear weapons published over objects of the government. However the strange thing about our system is the SCOTUS has ruled that “obscenity” is not speech and thus is not protected (obscenity is defined as something which only has an appeal to a “prurient interest.” Or as one SCOTUS justice has said: you know it when you see it.")
If I want to publish a paper saying all Jews are scum and the Holocaust was the best thing ever, I can. If I want to publish a paper saying it should be the motivation of all people to eradicate the Jews, I can. If I want to publish a paper denying the Holocaust, I can. There are literally no prohibitions on hate speech. And you can’t convict someone of trying to “incite violence” except in cases in which they are directly inciting specific people to commit violence on a specific person (so basically if Hitler came back to life his speeches would not be criminal here, because he typically railed against Jews and other minorities in the general and not the specific sense.)
Contrast us to the United Kingdom and we have a far different system for libel and slander. It is very, very, very difficult to win a libel or slander case in the United States, and if you’re a public person it might as well be considered nigh-impossible. In the United Kingdom rich and powerful men have routinely successfully sued detractors for libel and slander.
In the United States it is also seen as the role of the press to report on anything that happens in the public sphere. We have a very open criminal court process and the public reports on it. Further, our police departments routinely publish a list of everyone they arrested on a given day, and newspapers also routinely publish lists of all arrests in the “police blotter” and other such sections of the newspaper.
It is not seen as the role of the press to prevent someone from having a negative impression created of them during a criminal trial. Instead it is seen as the role of the court itself to insure that the jury has not been influenced by any publicity and that they remain insulated from ongoing publicity about a notable case.
In other countries there are laws criminalizing the publication of certain details about a case because of a concern that it “poisons the well” against the defendant. Such laws would be considered an unthinkable limit of our civil liberties. In America our civil liberties are almost entirely about freedom to do things and very rarely about freedom from having things done to you. The only “freedom from having things done to you” that are enshrined as civil rights tend to be rights that restrict the actions of government. [Obviously if another private citizen commits assault, theft, or other crimes against you there are laws to handle that, but that is not considered “civil rights” by most.]
In the case of a sex crime prosecution, it will be a matter of public record and the case, arrest, and proceedings will be highly publicized. Does anyone here deny this process essentially permanently tars the good name of the defendant? Absolutely. However the only way we could legally restrict it was by prohibiting publication of information about the case. In essence we have to engage in “rights weighing” to decide which right prevails: the right of the press to publish information of public important, or the right of an individual to have an embarrassing legal proceeding against him kept secret. Our system has came down heavily on the side of freedom of the press.
Note I am not trying to say this is good or bad, just that it is how it is. Instinctively most people will support their own system, so American posters will strongly support our way of doing it and French posters will strongly support their way of doing it. I think there are good points on both sides and I don’t view a country that does it one way versus another as “barbaric” although unfortunately some of the French posters in this thread seem to act that way towards the American legal system.
Something else worth quickly noting is that in the United States you also have no legal protections as a rape accuser. If you accuse someone of rape your name can be made public just like the accused. The reason it is not is because of informal agreements by pretty much all major media outlets to not publish the names of victims of sex crimes, unless they are already publicly known (examples like Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart…)
In journalism school in the U.S., concealing the name of a person who is a victim of a sex crime is seen as part of journalistic ethics. However, these are all informal rules and can and have been broken. They are not enshrined in the law. For example in the 1990s a woman was jogging through central park when she was viciously beaten and raped by a gang of men. She nearly died, and the attack gained massive publicity, she became known as the “Central Park Jogger” because her name was kept out of the papers. (She has come forward some decade or so after the fact and revealed her name to the public.)
The men accused of assaulting her were all black youths. During the case, there were a few small papers, most of them “black nationalist” type papers, that openly published the name of the Central Park Jogger and even basically said she was a slut or a whore. This was because those papers had a strong political bent that made them favor the black defendants over the accuser. I will concede that there have been from time to time local laws prohibiting the publication of names of rape victims in the United States. In every case, when those laws have been challenged in court they have been struck down as unconstitutional (Cox Broadcasting Corporation v. Cohn, Florida Star v. B.J.F., State of Florida v. Globe Communications Corp..)
What I will also finally say is this, DSK is a smart man who has traveled the world. He has spent much time in the United States, he is not some college kid that came over here.
If I’m in Sweden I know that I can’t drive a car at a BAC of .06, if I’m in Italy I know that if I’m arrested there will be many aspects of the legal process that will be alien to me. Some of them would be violations of my civil rights if they happened in the United States.
DSK basically should have and did know how things work here in the United States. He knew that if anything like this ever happened it would be extremely publicized in the papers. Hell, I think there have even been news reports that DSK feared getting trapped by a “honey pot” by his political enemies. In spite of that, he comes on to a random maid in a hotel room? If I was a French voter I probably wouldn’t care one way or the other about who my politicians had consensual sex with–as an American voter I don’t care about such things; but I would have serious questions about a man who has now repeatedly in his life been on trial for serious crimes and even if 100% innocent has shown undeniably bad judgment in getting into those situations. Is that the kind of man you want overseeing one of the world’s most powerful military forces / nuclear arsenals?
She got into the country (in part) because she lied on her application for asylum. What are you talking about?
I would think it is racist to imply, via the question that somehow colour is involved (“is that racist”). Any immigration service I presume can be fooled now and again by fake asylum stories, after asylum stories come from people coming from dictatorships - as Guinea Conakry was - with nasty human rights records and a charming tendency to disappear people. Not as if the Americans could send someone round to investigate. I rather think it better to err on the occasional liberality and get a faker in than err and send real political people back to torture and death under dictators.
As long as you are fine with Obama on a short stop over in Paris, being thrown in jail accused of some rape or bestiality or whatever charge solely on the (invented as it turns out later) word of a single person, and then being paraded before cameras in a pink prison suit and handcuffs and generally being ridiculed and jeered at by the Parisian mob.
“Invented” is not (yet) a factually-supported word in this case.
Are you really supporting tribalism over justice here? :dubious: “He’s our guy, so it’s outrageous even to suggest he might have done it”, is that it?
I find your response to my post very telling, essentially it seems to me you just want to engage in recreational outrage. I have already said that:
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I don’t argue the American way is right or wrong, it just is.
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Savvy people like DSK should and do know how things are in the United States, and you need to recognize the legal situation where you travel. FWIW the U.S. State Department advises that no matter where you travel: “You will be subject to the laws in whichever country you are in, and if you violate the laws of another sovereign state you will not have the same protections as you do in the American legal system.”
It’s Travel 101. I can see a college student spending a summer abroad not knowing all of this, but a 60+ year old internationally famous politician who has spent his whole life traveling extensively? Come now.
Your example about Obama is ludicrous and out of bounds. We didn’t arrest Sarkozy, we arrested a person not even part of the French government. He did not enjoy diplomatic immunity in this context. Obama or Sarkozy are different because they are actual parts of the American and French governments specifically.
Maybe try again?
Think of an American who works at an NGO or something in France? I don’t know of any off the top of my head, I’m sure there are some. In that case if they were accused of a crime against a French person I would be 100% okay with them being treated as any other French defendant would, DSK’s treatment is typical of the treatment of any defendant in a case which attracts great public interest.
In America it’s more about how interested the press is in the case than anything else, when it comes to how much public awareness there is and how much “perp walking” goes on.
Your opinion that arresting someone “based solely on the word of one person” is ludicrous too. In most rape cases there is only going to be one witness, yet I’m assuming people still get charged and convicted of rape in France based on the word of a single accuser. However, as I imagine it probably is in France, the police evaluate it on a case by case basis. If a woman has no visible injuries, is known locally as a fraud, and is accusing someone there is no credible evidence she has ever met of rape it will be investigated before anything happens. If a woman is working in a hotel and goes downstairs to her boss and says “I’ve been beaten and the guest sexually assaulted me” and she had visible injuries and they knew who the guest was because of the room number, then the police are going to respond by arrest first and foremost.
Remember, arrest != conviction, and the rules of evidence are far different. You can also be detained for a period of time on even lighter grounds if the police deem it necessary.
I’m just ascertaining that you would be fine with the Obama-in-stocks scenario.
We have yet to have any proof that this woman lied about being raped.
Just because she lied on her asylum application(which I suspect is pretty common) and was probably allowing some drug dealers to use her bank accounts to launder money doesn’t necessarily mean that we should dismiss her claim that she was raped.
Now yes, as it is, DSK probably can’t be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but that’s a far cry from simply assuming, as you seem to be, that the woman lied.
Further, as DSeid has said, just because she’s a lying piece of shit doesn’t mean she lied about this. DSK wasn’t convicted when he was arrested but he sure as hell isn’t exonerated now, and won’t be even if the charges get dismissed.
Why was she so visibly injured? How would she have staged this when to everyone’s knowledge DSK was not even in the room? Even the hotel management thought he had checked out.
You said “invented”. :dubious: I am never fine with that.
Maybe you should try a better analogy.