Former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn loudly declared that he didn't rape a maid in his hotel room during his stay in New York. Strauss-Kahn is certainly entitled to proclaim his innocence. Under the law he is just that, innocent until convicted in a court of law. But the same can't be said for his alleged victim. Virtually from the moment that she made the charge against Strauss-Kahn, she has been tried, convicted, sentenced, and pilloried relentlessly in the press and on blogs and websites.
There's no mystery why. She has five strikes against her that made her ripe for the race baiting and victim bashing pickings of much of the media, the public, French officials, and from many African writers. She is a low wage domestic, a West African immigrant whose legal status has been subject to question, she allegedly resided in a Bronx apartment building that caters exclusively to the HIV/AIDS afflicted, and by inference is HIV afflicted, and most importantly is a black woman.
Strauss-Kahn is rich, powerful, politically connected at the highest levels, and is popular with French public opinion. Strauss-Kahn's defenders didn't stop there. They blithely ignored his checkered history of sexual bad behavior and victimization to reach even deeper in the apology bin to claim that he is the victim of an anti-Semitic conspiracy by everyone from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to unnamed political enemies. Their motive supposedly is to torpedo his chances at the French presidency. He's Jewish and is widely regarded and one of the front runners for the top spot. An initial poll cited by the French public radio service RFI found that nearly 60 percent of those polled said that Strauss-Kahn was "set-up."
None of these things have absolutely any relevance to the charge. Either Strauss-Kahn did or didn't commit the act that he is charged with. His or his alleged victim's status is meaningless to the facts of the case. But that's simply to look at rape cases purely from the standpoint of the law and the facts in the case. And it's never that simple. Race would cast a long shadow over the charge even if Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim had none of the strikes against her and Strauss-Kahn was not a rich, politically powerful figure, with no dubious history of sexual bad behavior and victimization.
Women's groups have waged a relentless and often times frustrating fight to get police, prosecutors, the courts and the media to treat rape as a serious crime, especially when the victims are poor, black or minority women and the alleged attackers are white males. They have battled the long history of gender and race stereotypes and the routine negative typecasting of black women as sexually loose, available, and crime prone. In decades past that made police hesitant to make arrests and prosecutors reluctant to vigorously prosecute rape cases when the victims were black women. That put women, particularly black women, at greater risk from sexual attack, and virtually assured that authorities would turn a blind eye to the perpetrators.
Strauss-Kahn in the not too distant past would have likely gotten the full benefit of the traditional official blind-eye to a rape charge against a black woman, and if arrested, would have quickly posted bail, and winged his way back to France. Everything would have been said and done to paint his accuser as a gold-digging, liar, of tainted character. Race would lurked underneath the character assassination and used subtly and openly to make the slur against her believable.
This is exactly what's being done now even though authorities did throw Strauss-Kahn in a jail cell and initially deny him bail. The battle lines over whether he is truly a sexual predator or an innocent victim of a money scam, a set-up, or politically motivated attack will heat up in the coming days if and probably when Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim name and picture is "leaked." It will be plastered over blogs and websites and the rumor mill will churn overtime feeding on every tidbit of gossip, allegation, and distorted fact about the alleged victim. She will be retried and re-convicted again in the press. The image assault will be dutifully punctuated with a choice quote from Strauss-Kahn's attorneys and prominent defenders that he is a victim and a target, and that it's absolutely incredulous that a man of his name and prestige, and with so much to lose would stoop to have sex with a maid, and unstated but strongly inferred, a black maid at that.
Strauss-Kahn set the wheel in motion for his counter-attack when he again passionately denied following his release on $1 million bail that he was innocent. The case and the subsequent trial will continue to stir passions and resentments, and will be yet another object lesson that when the alleged victim is a black female and the accused attacker is a white male politics, race and passions always collide. The lines will be deliberately blurred between just who is the real victim. In this case with much of the public it won't be Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson
The legal system doesn't just exist for the poor and downtrodden, it actually does exist for the wealthy and privileged as well. The willingness to believe that a wealthy person committed a crime because they are wealthy is a form of BIGOTRY.
I am a black single mother, poor most of my life. I'm darn near as minority as you can get. And yet I have enough intelligence to be able to convincingly lie about being attacked. I can pretend to be distraught. I'm not automatically innocent and good simply because of my background, just like I'm not automatically corrupt and bad because of it.
It kills me that some of the people who would stand by my side and demand fairness and equality for me because I'm a minority would turn their backs on someone else because they are not a minority. Defending the ideals of this country means NOTHING if you can't defend those ideals for EVERYONE. Freedom of speech isn't just for the tolerant, it's also for the intolerant. Freedom of the press isn't just for nonpartisan media, it's for partisan media as well.
And "innocent until proven guilty" isn't just for the most sympathetic, believable character. Once upon a time, it was. That was back when delicate lil white women could make a single accusation, and without any trial or jury, the hulking, intimidating looking black guy could be declared innocent and lynched. Remember that? That's what happens when you assume that the poor innocent victim is telling the truth. Sometimes people who didn't commit the crime get punished for it.
A lot of liberals remind me of the United States during the Nuremberg trial. What a HUMILIATION it is to have some of the worst people on the planet point at you and say, "Well, you're doing it, too" about ANYTHING. And yet that's what liberals do when they prejudge based on their obvious bias - giving people who are bigoted against minorities justification for their own behavior. It makes them able to point and say, "You're doing it, too."
It's weird. I never thought I'd be defending a powerful wealthy white guy from discrimination, but then, I never thought I'd be defending the KKK's right to have a rally, or a Christian group's right to post anti-abortion advertisements. But that's what equality and freedom is about - equality for ALL, even the people you don't like.
I think I just assumed that the vast majority of liberals would've been going the "innocent until proven guilty" route, while the conservatives made the biased judgments based on no evidence and gut feelings and such.
It's like a bit of a sucker-punch to realize that when certain anti-affirmative-action people scream about how non-minorities get discriminated against, they might actually have a legitimate point.
An arrest of a powerful member of global elite and draconian bail conditions is an example of misogyny?!
This is some definition of misogamy we haven't previously been aware of.
Defense strictly along tribal lines. Not very objective, are we.
And obviously they have reached that goal, since a member of white global elite was arrested for an alleged rape of a African woman.
What the author has presented is what post-modernist J.J. Lyotard called "petiti recit," personal view of reality. As such it is a valid view but in no possible way ti reflects the complexity of reality.
And in this case this 'petiti recit' is seriously skewered by tribal allegiance. Another person can present equally valid view diametrically opposed to the one presented here. And be equally correct.
Then there is the "race issue" which have been playe only in American media. I don't think it is relevant. The facts are: One women accuses one man of rape. This is a crime, he should be judged. That would be the same if Strauss Kahn was black, Chinese or anything else... She is black but this should be the same whatever race she could be. Both France and America claims to have equal right for everyone. Then, the race is just irrelevant, we should not talk about it, it doesn't change anything to this case. This mean that both Strauss Kahn and the victim should not use this argument.
I'm French and I think that DSK was a good politician, he did a good job as head of the IMF. But if he tried to rape that women he should be punished, no one is above the law. If he is not, he should be released and she should be punished.
"(...) labor groups and hotel housekeepers have reported at least 10 other [sexual] attacks in the U.S. in recent years, from the Washington, D.C. suburb of Gaithersburg, Md., to remote Grand Island, Neb.
Labor groups say many more are hushed up because the victims are illegal immigrants or because hotels are wary of scaring off guests. Many hotels laid off security staff during the recession, leaving workers even more vulnerable, they said.
"It's dangerous work," said Yazmin Vazquez, who works at a hotel in downtown Chicago. "These customers think they can use us for anything they want because we don't have the power that they have or the money that they have."
Anthony Roman, a consultant based on New York's Long Island who spent 30 years working security for hotels, said he saw dozens of incidents involving female room attendants, from drunken propositions to rape.
"They're not an infrequent occurrence," he said."
http://tinyurl.com/3cqpa7j
As it is always the case with our elite members, who have the misfortune to be temporary inconvenienced in pursuit of their own unhealthy predilections, this brief period of discomfort will, more likely than not, turn out to be just a tiny bump on an otherwise smooth ride through life for DSK.
The woman who had the bad luck to stumble upon him in this wretched hotel, however, can claim no such cushiony privileges.