France: DSK in the clutches of U.S. justice

Was the perp walk really necessary? asked Le Monde in an editorial. The news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, had been arrested on suspicion of attempted rape of a hotel maid was humiliating enough. To parade him in front of the world’s reporters was gratuitously cruel. Here in France, we have a law against showing an accused person in such a prejudicial position, and for good reason. “When one of the world’s most powerful men is exposed to photographers while coming out of a police station handcuffed, hands behind his back, he is already being subjected to a sentence which is specific to him.” The charges against DSK, as he’s known here, are “particularly serious” and should certainly be thoroughly investigated. But a fair trial may be hard to come by now that he has been “deprived of his presumption of innocence in the media.”

The spectacle of DSK in cuffs “was at once fascinating—almost hypnotic—and deeply nauseating,” said Olivier Picard in Strasbourg’s Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace. That such a powerful man can be brought so low so quickly, and by his own arrogance and hubris, speaks to “the fears deep within us all.” Perhaps this thunderous fall will cause the Parisian media and political elite to question our own tendency to minimize the bad behavior of our leaders. “For years, politicians and many journalists were well aware of DSK’s ‘little weakness.’” But in the name of respect for personal privacy, we ignored it and took the risk that there would one day be a disaster. Why did nobody “have the courage to protect him from himself?”

Whatever happens, French politics have been upended, said Arnaud Leparmentier in Le Monde. Pretty much everyone agrees that, guilty or not, DSK will no longer be the Socialists’ candidate to run against President Nicolas Sarkozy next year. While DSK hadn’t announced his candidacy because of IMF rules, we all knew he was running, and he was polling ahead of Sarkozy. So the Sarkozy camp can hardly contain its joy. That schadenfreude, though, is tempered by the acknowledgement that having such a prominent figure charged with sexual assault reflects badly on France. “There are two victims here,” said Ecology Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. “One is alleged: the maid in New York. The other is proven: That is France.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Americans are already unleashing their anti-French stereotypes, said Philippe Boulet-Gercourt in Le Nouvel Observateur. America has “not the slightest atom of sympathy” for DSK. To them, he is “a Frog suspected of trying to evade American justice by jumping on the first Air France flight out.” If he’s guilty, DSK will surely get a severe sentence. And even if instead he was “the victim of a conspiracy” to catch him in a honey trap, as many French people believe, the Americans will still despise him, because their strong puritanical streak condemns all extramarital relations. In the coming days, we can expect “a torrent of headlines and good old clichés about the cowardly and depraved French.”