DSK: with friends like these …

by digby

I haven’t written about the DSK rape case because well, I just haven’t. After reading many stories about it, it seemed obvious to me that this was a man with a serious issue with women, but as a strong civil libertarian I’m always loathe to pronounce guilt for a specific crime without seeing the evidence — or only seeing the evidence as it’s presented in the press by law enforcement. Even rape, which is the toughest, because my instinctive sympathies almost always run with the alleged victim. (But I also personally know a man who was falsely accused of sexual assault and basically had his life destroyed, so the other possibility is something of which I am acutely aware as well.)

This, of course, is why we have a justice system — and why its presumption of innocence is so important. And it’s also why we have to watch it like a hawk to ensure that its meting out this justice as fairly and impartially as humans are capable of doing (which is to say, often pretty unfairly, especially to rape victims.) The nearly inevitable smearing of victims in these cases constitutes an assault in itself, regardless of the original crime. Let’s just say that regardless of my civil libertarian principles, I’d be hard pressed to serve impartially on a jury in a rape trial if a lawyer brought up a victim’s past sexual history or brutally assassinated her character.

I could go on, but Scott Lemieux said it all here, in response to some triumphalist who claims that anyone who tended to believe the charges was a victim of political correctness, and compared it to the Duke LaCrosse case:

“Too couched in political correctness”? This argument-by-empty-buzzword just seems to be the same droit du seigneur that BHL was invoking after DSK was arrested. Even if this specific rich and powerful white man is proven to be innocent, it doesn’t flow from this that all powerless people who accuse powerful people of crimes are lying. (I also can’t make sense of “too neat” — what, her story would have been more credible if it was full of logical holes and obvious factual errors?) Similarly, the fact that the Duke Lacrosse players were innocent doesn’t mean that all accusations of sexual assault by people of lesser social status on campus are false. The BHLs and Ben Steins of the world — who smeared the victim and defended DSK based on absolutely nothing — have not been vindicated; at best, their bottom line might have been right by accident.

As of now, comparing the DSK case with the Duke case is utterly specious. First of all, with the Duke case it wasn’t just that the accuser had credibility problems; there were serious problems with the accuser’s account of the alleged “rape” itself and substantial independent evidence making it clear that the accused players were not in the house at the time that the alleged “rape” occurred. None of this is true, at this point, of DSK. The evidence leaked to the NYT will probably make it impossible to pursue a prosecution and makes it more likely that the accuser isn’t telling the truth, but it does not establish DSK’s factual innocence. Secondly, Nifong pursued the case against the lacrosse players after the evidence of their innocence was overwhelming, in part by suppressing exculpatory evidence. The prosecutors in the New York case appear to be acting conscientiously and professionally.

When you say “we shut our minds to the possibility of innocence,” I’m afraid I’m going to need specific cites. Criticizing people who assumed DSK’s innocence based on his social status doesn’t mean rejecting any possibility that he was innocent, and as far as I can tell nobody claimed otherwise.

That’s the truth. With friends like Bernard Henri Levy, DSK is lucky he didn’t get life in prison. Let’s just say his defense was what made me tend to believe the charges.