On DSK

by MIRANDA

Today Justice Michael J. Obus dismissed the ongoing sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn filed three months ago by Nafissatou Diallo, at the request of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

Vance and other prosecutors formally told this to Diallo on Monday in a meeting that “lasted 20 or 30 seconds,” during which time “they accused her of lying but would not answer her questions,” according to her lawyer Kenneth P. Thompson. They gave her half a minute of their time.

Thompson tried to “keep the case alive”:

Thompson [filed] a motion on Monday asking that Mr. Vance’s office be disqualified. But about an hour before Tuesday’s hearing, a court clerk handed out a one-page decision in which Justice Obus denied Mr. Thompson’s motion.

Thompson appealed the decision, but an appellate judge struck down the appeal Tuesday afternoon, clearing the way for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to return to France.

The prosecutors submitted the request for dismissal based on a “pattern of untruthfulness” in Diallo’s responses to questioning after Strauss-Kahn’s indictment. She lied or contradicted herself on multiple accounts relating to both the incident itself, its aftermath, and her past.

“At the time of the indictment, all available evidence satisfied us that the complainant was reliable,” Ms. Illuzzi-Orbon told Justice Obus. “But the evidence gathered in our post-indictment investigation severely undermined her reliability as a witness in this case, to the point where we are no longer able to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Diallo’s lawyer Thompson said that the district attorney’s office “has abandoned an innocent woman and has denied an innocent woman a right to get justice in a rape case. And by doing so, he has also abandoned other women who will be raped in the future or sexually assaulted.” (On an international scale, Tristane Banon comes to mind as one such woman. On a local scale, I think of myself.)

No one is disputing that Diallo lied. But we cannot pretend that her lies account fully for the case’s dismissal. The district attorney’s office has been criticized, and in my view rightly so, for its hasty handling of the case when it was first reported.

Some critics have contended that Mr. Vance’s office is to blame for some of the problems that arose in the case. They pointed to the prosecutors’ decision, shortly after Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, to reject an agreement under which Mr. Strauss-Kahn would be freed on bail — a decision that forced them to move swiftly to seek an indictment from a grand jury rather than take more time to investigate details of the case.

The more deliberative course, these critics say, would have given prosecutors a chance to learn more about the housekeeper and perhaps avoid their early pronouncements that she was a powerful and “unwavering” witness.

I feel it is important to say that though I consider myself an honest person, strive for truth especially in matters of sexual assault, and take America’s system of justice seriously, I have little difficulty imagining myself lying under the stress of repeated, if compassionate, questioning, surrounded by many people (for example, “three prosecutors, an investigator and a translator”), while still in the early throes of what might be a long post-traumatic recovery process. And I believe that only someone with absolutely no understanding — personal, secondary, or cultural — of sexual assault would be unable to imagine the same of another human being.

It has been pointed out that even forensic evidence — Strauss-Kahn’s semen — is not worth much: “though the forensic evidence in the case shows that a sexual encounter occurred, it does not prove that it was forcible.” (There’s also some wistful speculation that if only she’d clawed his flesh in protest, collecting DNA under her fingernails, the case might have been saved.)

I am drawn to this quote from yesterday’s analysis by the NYTimes: “From his first court hearing, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers indicated that a sexual encounter did take place in the suite but suggested that whatever occurred was consensual.” Whatever occurred. He cannot bring himself to specify in detail what occurred — this would be too risky, to say it, to claim outright that she performed oral sex because she made clear that she wanted to — but he just knows that whatever did occur was consensual.

So the plaintiff, the only other witness, is credible enough to remember what occurred — oral sex — but irreparably unreliable when it comes to all other testimony.

And I do wonder how consensual an “encounter” of these specifications might ever truly be — the specifications being: The woman, a person of decidedly low social status, an immigrant, an underpaid maid in a ritzy hotel, a woman of color; the man, who is undisputedly and in all respects one of the most powerful people in the world; the setting, her place of employment and his place of repose. I’m not trying to take away anyone’s agency; I don’t want to suggest that it is impossible for a hotel maid to consent to sex with a hotel guest. I only want to take a hard, broad look at the situation and ask, when every power narrative in place would suggest that consent was unlikely, why do we rush to the opposite conclusion?

Maybe she said no, maybe she screamed it. Maybe she begged. Maybe she fought. Maybe she gave in, because she began to realize that no matter what she did relief would not come — because his alleged actions were not a consequence of her behavior or her morals, but an unmitigable display of his own.

She lied afterwards, that much is clear. But since when does lying imply consent? I echo Eve Ensler, who asked: “How do you fight a rape case if you have lied in your past?” I’m angry at the system that’s fucked over not only Diallo, but also all those who were in her situation but did not come forward.

And if I am fully honest, I must admit that I’m self-consciously angry with Nafissatou Diallo too. For she is not the perfect victim, not the victim I somehow want her to be. She didn’t crush Strauss-Kahn in court like I’d fantasized. I had allowed myself to hope that this incident could be a turning point for the way our culture responds to sexual assault and an occasion to turn the tables on the power politics that too often control public opinion and yield a flimsy excuse for justice. Maybe it will be. But nonetheless I feel disappointed, and maybe cheated, by her lies which however indirectly have allowed another alleged perpetrator to walk away.

I feel anger and then self-contempt. I am disgusted with myself for momentarily taking anyone’s side but hers, because despite substantial effort I can’t suspend my disbelief of Strauss-Kahn’s innocence. Does anyone really think he didn’t do it?

Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, said that Ms. Diallo’s complicated case had been “mishandled by many people, including the victim’s lawyer… [But] the prospect of Dominique Strauss-Kahn simply walking away scot-free is appalling.”

New York, the beautiful city in which I feel so lucky to live, seemed sick today. I saw the headlines again and again across the subway’s cheap newspapers — “C’est la Free” stands out in my memory — and swallowed vomit. I did not allow myself to become frantic, though I wanted to. I wanted to run up to strangers, to grab hold of women I had never met and say, Did you hear? What do you think? What do you feel? Do you feel anger and sadness and outrage and exhaustion? Do you feel safe? Have you ever? And can you show me how?