Dominique Strauss-Kahn, you may be cooling your innocent-until-proven guilty heels at Rikers Island, but don't worry, Ben Stein is crying for you! Besides wondering why the IMF head and leading French politician has be behind bars and saying that white-collar, high-level professionals aren't usually criminals ("Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes?"), Stein writes on the American Spectator, "The prosecutors say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn 'forced' the complainant to have oral and other sex with him. How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? He's a short fat old man. They were in a hotel with people passing by the room constantly, if it's anything like the many hotels I am in. How did he intimidate her in that situation? And if he was so intimidating, why did she immediately feel un-intimidated enough to alert the authorities as to her story?" And then he adds:
People accuse other people of crimes all of the time. What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I love and admire hotel maids. They have incredibly hard jobs and they do them uncomplainingly. I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.
In other words, Ben Stein thinks the NYPD sucks and really wanted to arrest the head of the International Monetary Fund.
You can see more of Stein's points here, but let's tackle this one: "If he is such a womanizer and violent guy with women, why didn't he ever get charged until now? If he has a long history of sexual abuse, how can it have remained no more than gossip this long? France is a nation of vicious political rivalries. Why didn't his opponents get him years ago?"
Tristane Banon
Back in 2002, a young journalist named Tristane Banon interviewed Strauss-Kahn and met him an apartment. According to an interview she gave, Banon said they fought and he "opened my bra, tried to open my jeans. ... It finished very badly."
Banon was convinced not to press charges by her mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist Party official. On TV yesterday, Mansouret explained what she told her daughter back then, "Listen, you know, if he had raped you, I wouldn’t have any hesitation, but that wasn’t the case. He sexually assaulted you, there wasn’t any rape per se; so until the end of your life, you’re going to have on your résumé, you know, Tristane Banon is the girl who ... '" But now Mansouret realizes that probably wasn't a great idea and wrote on her blog, "Now I regret having persuaded her not to bring charges. I carry a heavy responsibility. My daughter was in a bad way but it was awkward for reasons of family and friendship."
Banon will now pursue a criminal complaint against Strauss-Kahn. Here in New York, Strauss-Kahn is accused of trying to rape a hotel maid, an African immigrant, at the Sofitel in Times Square on Saturday. Unsuccessful in tearing off her underwear, prosecutors say that "his penis made contact with the victim's mouth twice through the use of force." As the French reel at seeing images of Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs and in court,
