Agreed.
I’m reminded of the saying that if woman is going to be raped it’s best to be a nun or at least a virgin.
Not relevant, Sarkozy wasn’t arrested.
You understand agents of the government, especially heads of state, have different legal immunities than a private citizen working for an NGO? I guess not since you have just repeated the Obama question despite having the difference explained to you.
FWIW though, if Obama was accused of rape and it was a credible accusation I would want him to be punished just like any other person. Would he be? No, because as POTUS he would enjoy essentially immunity from arrest overseas by any of our allies such as France. Back home he would probably have to resign or even be impeached, but I doubt a criminal case would happen, I consider that a negative though, not a positive. No position should make you immune from the same treatment under the law as the common man.
It doesn’t matter if she was lying or not. In a hypothetically scenario Obama went on a short trip to Paris or Athens or Belgrade during his first election campaign and a woman, who it was later discovered was lying, accused him of rape. She might even perhaps had ruffled her clothes a bit to make it sound more plausible. Whatever, the result being that Obama was thrown in prison paraded around in a pink jump-suit, ball-and-chain and all the rest. Three weeks later it was discovered her story was extremely dubious so he was released. The woman lying was of course reprehensible, but the process of throwing Obama in jail, orange suit, hand-cuffs, etc., that I’m sure is perfectly fine with you, since it was not known at the time that she was lying.
Your post makes absolutely no rational sense.
You begin by saying that “it doesn’t matter if she was lying or not” and then spin a long tale dependent on the woman lying.
Now I’m not sure why you’re so utterly certain that the woman lied about being raped by DSK.
Just because she lied on her asylum application and allowed some criminals to use her bank accounts to launder money doesn’t strike me as strong evidence that she would decide to, seemingly on a whim, seduce DSK, proceed to have extremely rough sex with him, tear her own ligament, bruise her vagina, immediately tell her supervisor about it, and then report it to the police.
By your standards, any woman who’s been involved in prior criminal activity or even lied to the IRS can be raped, so long as she’s the only witness to the attack.
So now if you’re talking about Obama pre-Presidency that is materially different than just saying “Obama.”
If the police had a justifiable reason under the justice system of the country in which Obama was present, to warrant an arrest, then I would be perfectly fine with him being treated exactly as any other defendant would be treated. I would not expect him to be treated exactly the same as he would be in the United States, because Greece doesn’t have the same legal system as America, neither does France, Italy, Serbia, or any number of other countries.
Is it your position that in France if a woman working in a hotel goes to her boss, beaten up and saying there was a man in the room who tried to rape her, that the French police would not try to detain him or stop him from leaving the country? I’m not a lawyer and certainly not a Frenchman but I seriously doubt that is how your justice system works.
It is the function of police to decide if sufficient evidence exists to warrant an arrest. In this case, they felt there was sufficient evidence. You don’t conduct a prosecution then arrest someone, you take someone into custody then prosecute them. That is how it is typically done. Even in France I know that the police will arrest you before you are convicted in court.
I will also say this. If an American Presidential candidate was in this situation overseas my outrage would be directed at him, not France, Italy, Greece or any other hypothetical country. As a public figure you represent your country abroad even if you are not actually part of the diplomatic corps.
I absolutely would be abhorred at even the thought that an American Presidential candidate should receive special treatment under French law and be treated differently than other defendants. I guess that is just a fundamental difference, I think all people should be equal under the law and some people think famous politicians should be exempt from the same treatment as other criminals.
Well that is the reality. It sort of has to be. As long as the only evidence is the alleged victim’s word vs the alleged perpetrator’s word, then anything that makes the alleged victim seem to be an unreliable witness will destroy the ability to eliminate any reasonable shadow of doubt.
She may be telling the truth, she may not be. The bruising makes me think she likely is. But her past dishonesty and inconsistent recollection of the events eliminates the possibility of convincing a jury that her version is true beyond that reasonable shadow of doubt and any accused is entitled to that doubt. Even though many a rapist will go unpunished as a result.
Meanwhile yes, a candidate Obama in France who had a maid claiming that he raped her, who had bruising as if sexually attacked, and whose clothes had ejaculate that matched Obama’s, should be arrested by the French authorities and prevented from leaving the country. 100% yes, as should a Carter, a Bush, either one, anyone. Americans have been arrested and tried in other countries you know, including VIP ones.
Now she’s a hooker who pimps pyramid schemes on the side!? Man the shoes don’t stop dropping in this case!
I totally agree. Asylum seekers who say they haven’t ever been persecuted in their country and that they intend to be involved in money laundering and drug traffick shoudln’t be let in. :rolleyes:
Rune isn’t French. He’s a Dane, if I’m not mistaken.
I think it’s fucked up that a man accused of rape gets his name and photo and information splattered all over everything for the entire world to see, and meanwhile it’s impossible to find the name or a picture of the woman who has accused him and now apparently may have been doing so falsely.
If it starts getting bad enough that the police investigate her for lying to them, then her name can come out. Until then, it would be a horrid thing to do — “chilling effect” and all that.
That’s… wow. So your thesis is that people (or at least public personalities) should live according to how people could bear false witness against them ? That makes total sense. I, for one, decided not to have kids so as never to be accused of incest by my raging asshole of a neighbour.
Guess what: if someone cries rape against you, it doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do. When you’re accused of rape, nobody is ever going to go “who, him ? No, no that’s not possible, that’s just not right. I don’t believe he could do such a thing”. At the *very *best, they will go “Who, him ? I would never have guessed. I suppose you never really know people, huh ? What a shitbag.”
Now, I’m not saying it’s a smart thing to do to fuck random hotel maids or whatever. It’s just that the idea that it’s a horrible horrible decision that reflects bad on him no matter what really happened, is bogus. Just like it was bogus to fire Weiner over his twitter shenanigans, or whatsisface for blazing the Appalachian trail.
As long as it all happens within the bounds of the law, all you have is ridiculous “moral” outrage. That shit should not matter.
They evidently are. Because people like you are determined to make them so.
I can definitely get behind that but that is the collective decision of private media outlets. They choose to publicize DSKs name and by convention they choose not to publicize the accuser.
However, once the charges against him are officially dismissed if there is a “story” that would substantiate some evidence of false rape accusation you will probably see the woman’s name leaked in the mainstream press.
There was a man guy who dated a woman for like a month, during that month he got her pregnant. They never really had a real relationship, and he quickly moved halfway across the country. However he maintained visitation rights and had his son flown out to him 2x a month for two weekends a month. The mother hated this and continually fought against it. One day the father came into town to see the new school his son was at because his mother had just changed schools, and he liked to meet his child’s teachers and etc. On that day the mother decided she didn’t want to share custody anymore so her and her boyfriend faked her rape, going as far as actually causing her somewhat serious vaginal injury with some sort of inanimate object. When they reported the horrible crime to the police she basically said “it was my ex, he came into the house and raped and abused me and then tried to strangle me with a plastic bag, I played dead and he left.” For something like eight months the father’s life was an absolute living hell. Luckily an investigator working for his defense attorney was able to find conclusive evidence through receipts the man had at various businesses he had gone to which made it factually impossible for the man to have been at his ex’s house raping and attempting to murder her.
However he spent several months in prison in the mean time. As more information came to light strong evidence came out that this woman had falsified the entire attack (early on it looked like maybe she was just wrong about who her attacker had been…she did say the man wore a mask, but swore it was her ex and the police officer she first spoke with took her word 100% because his professional opinion was she was “credible.”)
This guy actually came out better than most, although I do believe he lost his job nonetheless he was a Vice President of some sort at a company. But he did end up winning custody of his child in addition to a large civil judgment against his ex that put her on the hook for all of the legal expenses he incurred defending himself. Unfortunately though the prosecutor in the jurisdiction this happened declined to prosecute the woman criminally (the fact that the civil court system later agreed with his argument that she had caused him financial harm due to a false rape accusation gives some evidence that it is pretty reasonable to assume she factually did in fact try to frame the guy.) Now, this woman’s name was never in the media during the period in which the man was in prison on the rape charges. Once the whole false accusation thing came to light her name is now in all the major media sources reporting on it.
There’s another prominent case in which two teenaged girls basically didn’t like one of their teachers so they made up a story that he molested them. Since two girls both reported separate incidents it was seen as very credible and the man suffered immense harm to his reputation. It quickly came out as being a false accusation but how can you undue such immense harm to your reputation? As a teacher it would make it very hard to find future employment.
So yes, it does suck immensely to be falsely accused of a crime. But in America we still put the right of the press to freely report on public matters above and beyond that. The rights of society to enjoy free speech trump the rights of individuals to not have criminal suits against them publicized.
Stories like the one above make me literally sick to my stomach that there are people out there craven enough to do things like that.
I think the penalty for anyone who makes such a false, reputation-destroying accusation should be for that person to be forced to appear in a public service announcement in which they basically proclaim, to the audience, “I am an immoral, lying scumbag who is sick enough to destroy someone else’s life by framing them for a crime they did not commit”. At the bottom of the screen should be the full name, home address and telephone number of the accuser. Nobody deserves to live a normal life ever again after so ruining the life of another in this horrible way.
I do, in fact, believe that this would be a very effective deterrent. False reporting of rape is not a crime of passion. It is a highly detailed and elaborate plan that must be thought out in advance and deliberated; knowing the penalty above, I sincerely think that fewer people would try to do this and take the risk.
What makes you so sure it’s that common?
What does it being common or not have to do with anything ? It demonstrably happens, and as of right now there’s not much being done to deter it happening, or fix the aftermath when it does.
In fairness, the French reaction to DSK’s perp walk does seem to have inspired some recognition here about how prejudicial, not to mention unnecessarily humiliating, that practice is. It may eventually lead to perp walks staged for news cameras being banned altogether. If that happens, yes, we should recognize who helped us realize the problem and why.
But they’re still off-target by thinking it was done especially for a French guy. It’s the usual practice with *any *high-profile arrest in the US. He did *not *get special treatment in that regard.
It is also not a high-profile arrest because of his being a foreign politician - knowledge and interest in any other country’s domestic politics in the US is whale-shit low. It’s high profile because of concern for justice - we have a history, as does most of the planet, of the wealthy being able to get away with crimes that ordinary people cannot. We have a strong cultural view, often violated though it may be, that no one is above the law. When the suspect is wealthy and appears to have that attitude, the sense of retribution is strong. It really has nothing to do with his being French.
He didn’t say anything at all about how common it is.
I guess that would be me. Present, Sir.
I can not fathom how you managed to draw that conclusion from what I wrote. The Puritan charge was not against DSK being prosecuted for serious (and backed) charges, it was for the hordes of American posters that find what happened to DSK completely OK, as he “was asking for it”.
Sorry, but if he didnt rape, then he deserved nothing of this. And, as a result of a seriously fucked up inquiry by the NY police, DSK will never be able to prove he’s innocent or not. Our major candidate for the Left has been pulverized for nothing. From here, it’s starting to look as if our candidates have to be vetted by the US courts. Maybe we should send all our candidates there, that would even the odds.
Apparently you think that’s the normal way to do things, the rest of the world probably differs.
I dont think moral (or judicial) relativism can properly explain the unrepairable damage done to DSK.
Whatever happens, he will remain under suspicion (and mind you, I dont exclude the fact that he could totally be guilty) for the rest of his life (his real one, his political career is probably done and over by now).
But saying, after the mounting pile of shit that keeps growing up day after day on this case, “well, that’s just the way we do it”, that’s a bit light for an answer.
Cite? Has DSK EVER been tried or even under investigation for any sex crime???
See, that’s what I was talking about. In a Puritan country you can throw moral mud at someone and know that, no matter what, it will stick. He’s not guilty? Doesnt matter, he is shady.
When moral impression supersedes the truth (maybe he should say he has found Jesus, I hear it works).