A rush to condemn DSK

Now that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been all but exonerated of sexual-assault charges, said Bernard Cohen in the French Rue89, we can ask why the Americans were so quick to condemn him as a rapist. The answer is easy: The dominant mind-set in the U.S. is “moral superiority.” Almost to a person, Americans are “holier than thou.” The phrase is “such a part of their culture that it is even the title of a Metallica song.” This is why the U.S. is the only advanced nation that still uses the death penalty. And it’s why it has also developed another legal way to kill: “the media lynching” that DSK was subjected to. American newspapers were bursting with analyses of the supposed culture of impunity in France, portrayed as a land where oversexed, arrogant men run about groping meekly silenced, long-suffering women. As a French man, DSK had no chance in the American court of public opinion. He was inherently “guilty of the crime of being European.”

The U.S. tabloids were mercilessly anti-French, said Jean-Marc Gonin in Le Figaro. The New York Daily News treated DSK as guilty right from the start. With headlines like “Le Perv,” the paper used “every cliché about the ribald French” that it could think of. It and its rival, the New York Post, “vied with each other to ridicule DSK” and portray him as a drooling old goat deranged with lust. It’s hardly comforting that the tabloids have now turned on the maid, labeling her a whore and alleging that she only accused DSK because he failed to pay the entire fee she demanded for her service. There’s an odd kind of egalitarianism in the American media: Everyone gets smeared equally.

France is getting its comeuppance for laughing at America during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde. Back then we watched with “a mixture of bewilderment and glee” as America was “brought low by its own puritanism.” With DSK in the dock, it wasn’t as amusing. His case brought home to us the vast gulf between French and American judicial norms. The perp walk that deeply shocked and offended us, for example, is routine in America, because “unlike the French system with its presumption of innocence, the American system is accusatory.” Still, the American system is not without its benefits. French observers are amazed at the about-face by the prosecutor, who freely admitted that he’d found new evidence that DSK’s accuser was not trustworthy. Such a thing would never happen here. But that’s the American system for you: “It accuses, then investigates, and if the case collapses, it says so right away.”

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Still, a happy outcome for DSK doesn’t exonerate the American justice system, said Antoine Garapon in Libération. The adversarial method it uses is all about spectacle, not truth. The French justice system, by contrast, is not combative but investigative. Interviews and expert testimony are analyzed “in a scientific manner” and weighed by “professional judges,” rather than being wielded theatrically to sway a jury. The French system weighs facts; the American, impressions. An American court is a kind of “ritualized combat” in which “whoever shows the greatest might is deemed to be right.” That isn’t justice—it’s bullying.