Rape and the French elite

Bernard-Henri Levy begins his polemic on the alleged rape of a hotel chambermaid by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with a priceless example of what a better French philosopher called “bad faith”.

‘I do not know what actually happened Saturday, the day before yesterday, in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York. I do not know — no one knows, because there have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question — if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, at the time, as was stated, he was having lunch with his daughter.’

If a writer does not know, the best thing he or she can do is keep quiet and wait for a court to hear the facts of the case. But, of course Levy has no intention of holding his tongue. Although he does not know what he is talking about, the reader discovers that his declaration of ignorance was mere throat clearing. Levy strongly hints that the woman must be lying when she says she was alone with Strauss-Kahn. Extensive experience has taught him that “the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels” is to send a “cleaning brigade” of two people to a room.

His sympathy is all for his friend –  “thrown to the dogs…but still proud”; and for his friend’s wife – “no earthly law, should also allow another woman, his wife, admirable in her love and courage, to be exposed to the slime of a public opinion drunk on salacious gossip and driven by who knows what obscure vengeance.” Levy has no tear to spare for the alleged victim, a poor immigrant from Africa, who according to the New York press needed hospital treatment after the alleged assault.

Having dismissed one alleged victim, he moves on to a second. He condemns all those who “complacently” accept the story of Tristane Banon, and confidently asserts that she is a money-grubbing hussy. She “pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television”. In fact Ms Banon, has not “shut-up for eight years,” she went on French television in 2007 to give her account of what happened but the producers refused to allow her to name Strauss-Kahn on air.

However, none of the bad faith in Levy’s opening paragraphs can match the hypocrisy of his peroration:

‘I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime — and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact.’

He should be less troubled, because he ought to know, and if he did not know, ought to have taken the trouble to find out, that the law courts of Anglo-Saxon democracies do not require the defendant to prove anything.

Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The prosecution must prove that the accusation is true not the other way round. I don’t know if Levy is a victim of a poor translator, but the use of the word “fellow” also strikes me as suggestive . It conjures up a clubbable world of chaps, sticking together, and watching, scratching and covering each other’s backs.

Levy has form on this score. In a display of hyperbole, extraordinary even by the standards of the French intelligentsia, he described the arrest last year of Roman Polanski, who had fled justice to live in France after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, as a “lynching”. (The Swiss police did not send Polanski to the US to face an angry judge but released him and allowed to return to live in some comfort in Paris. Most victims of “lynchings” are not so fortunate.)

Levy has earned deserved praise for being one of the few left-wing European intellectuals prepared to make a stand against the fanatical misogyny of radical Islam. He cannot in good faith decry the oppression of women in Africa and Asia and then deride the accounts of his alleged victims of rape. He cannot be for women’s rights in Tehran and Riyadh but against them in New York and Paris, just as British conservatives cannot claim to be supporters of a modern party that stands up for the rights of women and then go along with their government’s plans to slash sentences for rapists.

If they do, too many people who once took them seriously will repeat the one line Levy wrote about Strauss-Khan that had a ring of authenticity about it. “I must stop here, for it makes me nauseous.”