Dominique Strauss Kahn: Doubts on maid's credibility

[Rosamund1980]

It's looking like DSK will get off, as doubt is placed on the maid. Why do these stories repeat themselves?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13986970

Dittany:

A) you don't own this thread. It's not about you. And your critiques of my posts - when you admit upthread that you do not understand what I wrote - are getting a little hard to follow as they become contradictory.
B) you actually rejected as worthless my point that the media had a key role in this. Perhaps you weren't reading what I actually wrote and are now attempting to have it both ways.

But as the personal attacks on me are likely to continue, I'll leave you to it. And hope that any other posters who make it this far will assess what I actually wrote and linked. Not what is said about it by someone who posted that they didn't understand.

As I said earlier, the point is that it has been proven that she gave false testimony to the grand jury and, as far as I know, DSK hasn't.

That is the only relevant point to come out of all this, and that is what will bring the case down. Whatever her reasons for doing so, the jury would not be able to convict DSK 'beyond reasonable doubt' now, surely. This business about whether prosecutors do or don't want to prosecute rapists is something of a smokescreen; it's irrelevant now.

You have said I am being deliberately obtuse and you are repeatedly twisting what I actually said, which is you have to look to the media for the important strands in opinion forming on this. Not your opinion - it's not about you. It was a serious point about the flows of information about these developments.

It is however abundantly clear now that such an approach is not considered valid, I have nothing more to say.

agree with rafanadaetc... if she's lied about what happened on that day and she's admitted lying then in a case which basically is resting on one persons word against another surely it would be impossible to convict dsk... If he didn't rape her he's been hugely unfairly treated.... if he did he'll likely walk away ...

never quite understood the automatic assumption from start that he had to be guilty...

I don't know if this is true, but I'm sure I've heard that a woman is actually more likely to be raped if she has been raped in the past. I'm not sure why.

Given then the appallingly low conviction rate, doesn't this mean that potentially there are a lot of women having their past rapes used to expose them as 'liars' when actually they were telling the truth on both occasions?

This is on R4 news right now! 1pm 3/7/11

Dittany
Have you seen the movie "My Cousin Vinny"? It's about an inexperienced lawyer who takes on his cousin's case and he is utterly shocked when the prosecution send him reams of info about the case. It's funny. He thinks he has to find everything out about the accuser / accusation himself, but by law, everything kown to the prosecution has to be shared.

If the prosecutors know:

• she has lied under oath
• on an asylum application
• has previous convictions

They HAVE to share this info with the defence. Iis completely normal practice. Letters such as the one linked to are standard.

Having said all that, i disagree that her past should be relevant to this case. But that's the system as it stands. I don't think it is veering from what happens in all cases.

More pertinent is:

-- liars can be raped
-- asylum seekers can be raped
-- victims of rape don't always conform to the "ideal" victim image we are fed by the media, ie might not report at once
-- his story changing - even if not under oath - has been given a free pass here. First, he denied all sexual contat, then it was consensual.

The only winner in this story?
The patriarchy.

Just been googling and I don't know if this is the study responsible for planting the thought in my mind, but I found a 1999 study by Acierno, Resnick, Kilpatrick, Saunders and Best published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders. They seem to be prolific authors in established American science journals, along with another author called Clum, so I think their studies would probably stand up to peer scrutiny.

Anyway, their study of 3000 women concluded that a woman who has been raped once was seven times more likely to be raped again.

I presume that this is partly because many rapes are carried out by intimate partners/former partners, while others will be perpetrated by someone in the victim's social circle which can leave them vulnerable to a repeat attack. I wonder if some may be explained by the victim's profile - e.g. a disadvantaged, vulnerable young woman would be much more at risk, and, dare-I-say-it, a black asylum-seeker.

I doubt we'll ever know the truth of what happened in that hotel room in this particular case, but I find it abhorrent that the fact that the 'maid' (sorry, dislike the name) has lied is given far more credence than the number of women who have come out publicly and said DSK has assaulted them to. I accept that one lie is legally recorded while the other is just media hearsay, but it just seems like character assassination to me. If that fact that you have lied on a previous occasion in your life means that nothing you say in court can be considered true, wouldn't that make most people unable to testify? Including incidentally DSK, who lied by firstly stating he had no contact with her. Shouldn't the two cancel each other out, and shouldn't the amount of other women who have made claims of sexual assault/harassment be allowed to be brought into the case if her previous sexual complaint history is allowed?

DSK could be innocent of this particular crime for all I know but it just seems to me that a vulnerable woman is having her past used against her in order to get him off, rather than the case being assessed on its own merits.

I think what depresses me most about all this is that DSK will undoubtedly get off (case will probably be dropped) and this case will be used as yet another example to pretend that women lie in far greater numbers about rape than any other crime.

And FWIW, while I have not seen the evidence or heard statements etc, I think he's a creepy, entitled, misogynistic lech anyway, who is definitely capable of rape IMO, so I think he's probably guilty as hell.

Fortunately, it doesn't matter what we think. It matters what a jury thinks. Otherwise it's just rule by mob mentality.

If the prosecution doesn't have a case then, oh well.

Guilty people get away with stuff all the time. I am just sick of the guilty until proven innocent attitude I see most people have when it comes to matters of rape. If we start down that path, then whose to say it won't stop there?

Re: credibility. It seems that DSK's PR machine is winning.

This is a man who as a titan of the French Socialist party seems to think it perfectly normal to receive sexual services/ 'consensually' from a hotel worker (huge money/power imbalance), then meet his daughter for lunch before trying to fly home to his wife. All part of a normal weekend?

To think he still has a chance of re-entering the French presidential race...

I feel sorry for the accuser- she doesn't stand a chance.

I'm not after a lynch mob Tina. That would make me no better than the person I personally believe is a rapist. While it sticks in my throat, if DSK gets off I will accept that he has been found innocent in a court of law and I won't be on the Internet advocating violence towards him or anything. I accept your point that we have to have the burden of proof for all convictions in all areas of crime because otherwise we'd be locking up loads of innocent people.

My bugbear is that for some reason rape victims seem to have to provide a greater burden of proof than normal because it seems to be automatically assumed they're lying - possibly because no one wants to believe the alleged perpetrator is guilty of such a horrible crime (you get the same thing with murder but the presence of a dead body tends to make it a bit more black and white). A rape victim seems to be subjected to much greater scrutiny of her character than other victims of other crimes. And given the appallingly low conviction rate for rape (6%) correlated with the fact that only 2-4% of allegations are false, it seems that using a previous rape allegation that didn't result in a conviction to suggest the victim was lying is treading dangerously close to brutalising a victim all over again.

What I'd really like to see in sensitive cases such as rape is a scrapping of the adversarial system in favour of something where everyone involved in the case has the same objective - to find out what really happened, rather than merely trying to back up what their particular client is saying.

When a predator meets a fabricator, here

There's a lot of chatter here in France along the lines that he propositioned her for sex, she agreed, then afterwards she demanded payment which he refused so she "cried rape" (I hate that expression, but that's exactlymwhat people here are saying.

But in the NY Times article, unnamed law enforcement sources still say they believe she was sexually assaulted by DSK, but her creeibility is shot so no conviction by a jury will be possible.

It makes me want to scream. Nobody here is still talking about her as a victim of a sexual predator. That's gone.

If the new allegations about the maid that are currently being carried in the New York Post and Daily Mail (and repeated elsewhere) are true then chances of a trial taking place have been surely been further diminished.

The discussion now seems to be moving on, at least in some quarters, as to whether DSK should/would/could stand for the French Presidency.